Rating: ★★★★☆
Categories: Mystery, Horror, Short Stories
Things We Lost in the Fire is a collection of eerie stories centered on women and girls in Argentina, with a touch of urban myth. This exceptional short stories book is the second work by Mariana Enriquez I read and it’s become one of my favorite short stories books. The perfect mixture of mundane worries with surpernatural horror and with the endings open enough that you imagine what happens after the stories, and they live in your imagination longer than in the pages.
I can’t say I had high expectations, although I’d heard nothing but amazing things about this book, because I had been disappointed by Este é o Mar (not translated into English, I believe), but this blew me away. The horror is exactly perfect: creepy, suspenseful, sometimes a bit gory. I do love supernatural/magical realism that is seamlessly added to normal stories. I don’t normally like short stories very much and normally crave dense, larger books with fleshed-out world buildings, but there is something that really works about the brevity in these stories – they leave you thinking about them.
The voice of each narrator felt a bit similar to the others, perhaps because the writing style stays consistent throughout the book – it makes for a more pleasant reading for me, but also makes the main characters seem very similar to each other. The vagueness of their descriptions also helps with this impression. It’s easy to put yourself in place of these women. Most of these stories are focused on women and based on mundane horrors that take a darker, supernatural turn, like self-harm, bad marriages, missing children. This has so, so many trigger warnings, and it gets quite intense and gory at times.
Ooh, I’ve had this on my TBR forever! I really should get hold of a copy 👀
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Not to say you should, but you definitely should 👀😁
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👀
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Such a great review! I haven’t heard of this one but it sounds right up my alley. I’ll have to add this to my TBR.
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Thank you! It’s just SO GOOD, I was not ready for it to blow me away like that. Hope you like it too!
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Great review, I’m so glad you enjoyed this one! I read one story from this collection a while ago (I don’t remember much of the detail, just that I loved it- there was a house and a girl and that’s all I know lol), but never got around to reading the full set. It sounds well worth checking out in its entirety though, so I must pick it back up!
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Thank you, Emily! I thiiiink I know which story you’re referring to, and it was very creepy. I’d be curious to see which one you like best!
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This sounds great – your review really made me want to read the book for myself!
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It’s good!!! Really deserves more hype. If you pick it up, I’d love to know which story you liked best!
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