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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories Kindle Edition

by Mariana Enriquez (Author), Megan McDowell (Translator) Format: Kindle Edition

4.2 1,341 ratings

Editors' pick Best Literature & Fiction

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“The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro, The Guardian

SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • FINALIST: Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Ray Bradbury Prize, Kirkus Prize • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Oprah Daily, New York Public Library, Electric Lit, LitHub, Kirkus Reviews

Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre. Populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her new collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken—fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history—with bracing urgency. A woman is sexually obsessed with the human heart; a lost, rotting baby crawls out of a backyard and into a bedroom; a pair of teenage girls can’t let go of their idol; an entire neighborhood is cursed to death when it fails to respond correctly to a moral dilemma.

Written against the backdrop of contemporary Argentina, and with a resounding tenderness toward those in pain, in fear, and in limbo, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is Mariana Enriquez at her most sophisticated, and most chilling.

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“The beautiful, horrible world of Mariana Enriquez, as glimpsed in The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, with its disturbed adolescents, ghosts, decaying ghouls, the sad and angry homeless of modern Argentina, is the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time.”—Kazuo Ishiguro

“Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is haunted by the specter of late-twentieth-century Latin American history. . . . Yet because the fiction is so alive, the experience of being in her world is enjoyable.”—Francine Prose, New York Review of Books

“Stories of spirits and disappearances collectively address the mystery of loss through narratives that are as gripping as they are chilling.”—Chicago Review of Books

“Enriquez’s gaze throughout the collection is unflinching, taking readers into dark and grotesque territory, yet it is her morality, a pervasive sense of right and wrong, that anchors each story and prevents the collection from veering into the lurid horror of tabloid tragedy.”—Ploughshares

“Like her Chilean neighbor, the late Roberto Bolaño, Mariana Enriquez crafts fiction about the darkest recesses of the human heart that makes you feel light after reading it—uplifted by the precision and poetry of her characters’ voices.”—The A.V. Club

“The Dangers of Smoking in Bed establishes Enríquez as a premier literary voice. Enríquez's extraordinary—and extraordinarily ominous—fiction holds up a mirror to our bewildering times, when borders between the everyday and the inexplicable blur, and converge.”—O: The Oprah Magazine

“Horrors are relayed in a stylish deadpan. . . . Enriquez’s plots deteriorate with satisfying celerity.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[A] group of off-kilter tales enlivened by captivating unease. Every facet of her writing unsettles. . . . Enriquez, superbly translated by Megan McDowell, masterfully darts from disturbing to funny to repulsive without jarring the reader’s momentum—or, rather, the disturbance is built into the momentum.”—Tasteful Rude

“An atmospheric assemblage of cunning and cutting Argentine gothic tales . . . insidiously absorbing, like quicksand.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Enriquez’s wide-ranging imagination and ravenous appetite for morbid scenarios often reaches sublime heights. Adventurous readers will be rewarded in these trips into the macabre.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Enriquez['s] . . . straightforward delivery and matter-of-fact tone that belie the wild, gasp-worthy action unfolding on the page.”—Booklist

“Rotting little ghosts, heartbeat fetishes, curses and witches and meat: Each of these stories is a luscious, bewitching nightmare. I adore this book.”—Kirsty Logan, author of The Gracekeepers

“I loved these twisted tales, these lustful whispers in the dark. There is some serious power in this writing.”—Daisy Johnson, author of Sisters

About the Author

Mariana Enriquez is a writer and journalist based in Buenos Aires. She has published two story collections in English, Things We Lost in the Fire and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Angelita Unearthed

My grandma didn’t like the rain, and before the first drops fell, when the sky grew dark, she would go out to the backyard with bottles and bury them halfway, with the whole neck underground; she believed those bottles would keep the rain away. I followed her around asking, “Grandma why don’t you like the rain why don’t you like it?” No reply—Grandma dodged my questions, shovel in hand, wrinkling her nose to sniff the humidity in the air. If it did eventually rain, whether it was a drizzle or a thunderstorm, she shut the doors and windows and turned up the volume on the TV to drown out the sound of wind and the raindrops on the zinc roof of the house. And if the downpour coincided with her favorite show, Combat!, there wasn’t a soul who could get a word out of her, because she was hopelessly in love with Vic Morrow.

I just loved the rain, because it softened the dry earth and let me indulge in my obsession with digging. And boy, did I dig! I used the same shovel as Grandma, a very small one, like a child’s beach toy only made of metal and wood instead of plastic. The plot at the far end of the yard held little pieces of green glass with edges so worn they no longer cut you, and smooth stones that seemed like round pebbles or small beach rocks—what were those things doing out behind my house? Someone must have buried them there. Once, I found an oval-shaped stone the size and color of a cockroach without legs or antennae. On one side it was smooth, and on the other side some notches formed the clear features of a smiling face. I showed it to my dad, thrilled because I thought I’d found myself an ancient artifact, but he told me it was just a coincidence that the marks formed a face. My dad never got excited about anything. I also found some black dice with nearly invisible white dots. I found shards of apple-green and turquoise frosted glass, and Grandma remembered they’d once been part of an old door. I also used to play with worms, cutting them up into tiny pieces. It wasn’t that I enjoyed watching the mutilated bodies writhe around before going on their way. I thought that if I really cut up the worm, sliced it like an onion, ring by ring, it wouldn’t be able to regenerate. I never did like creepy-crawlies.

I found the bones after a rainstorm that turned the back patch of earth into a mud puddle. I put them into a bucket I used for carrying my treasures to the spigot on the patio, where I washed them. I showed them to Dad. He said they were chicken bones, or maybe even beef bones, or else they were from some dead pet someone must have buried a long time ago. Dogs or cats. He circled back around to the chicken story because before, when he was little, my grandma used to have a coop back there.

It seemed like a plausible explanation until Grandma found out about the little bones. She started to pull out her hair and shout, “Angelita! Angelita!” But the racket didn’t last long under Dad’s glare: he put up with Grandma’s “superstitions” (as he called them) only as long as she didn’t go overboard. She knew that disapproving look of his, and she forced herself to calm down. She asked me for the bones and I gave them to her. Then she sent me off to bed. That made me a little mad, because I couldn’t figure out what I’d done to deserve that punishment.

But later that same night, she called me in and told me everything. It was sibling number ten or eleven, Grandma wasn’t too sure—back then they didn’t pay so much attention to kids. The baby, a girl, had died a few months after she was born, suffering fever and diarrhea. Since she was an angelita—an innocent baby, a little angel, dead before she could sin—they’d wrapped her in a pink cloth and propped her up on a cushion atop a flower-bedecked table. They made little cardboard wings for her so she could fly more quickly up to heaven, but they didn’t fill her mouth with red flower petals because her mother, my great-grandmother, couldn’t stand it, she thought it looked like blood. The dancing and singing lasted all night, and they even had to kick out a drunk uncle and revive my great-grandmother, who fainted from the heat and the crying. There was an indigenous mourner who sang Trisagion hymns, and all she charged was a few empanadas.

“Grandma, did all this happen here?”

“No, it was in Salavina, in Santiago. Goodness, was it hot there!”

“But these aren’t the baby’s bones, if she died there.”

“Yes, they are. I brought them with us when we moved. I didn’t want to just leave her, because she cried every night, poor thing. And if she cried when we were close by, just imagine how she’d cry if she was all alone, abandoned! So I brought her. She was nothing but little bones by then, and I put her in a bag and buried her out back. Not even your grandpa knew. Or your great-grandma, no one. It’s just that I was the only one who heard her cry. Well, your great-grandpa heard too, but he played dumb.”

“And does the baby cry here?”

“Only when it rains.”

Later I asked my dad if the story of the little angel baby was true, and he said my grandma was very old and could talk some nonsense. He didn’t seem all that convinced, though, or maybe the conversation made him uncomfortable. Then Grandma died, the house was sold, I went to live alone with no husband or children, my dad moved to an apartment in Balvanera, and I forgot all about the angel baby.

Until she appeared in my apartment ten years later, crying beside my bed one stormy night.

The angel baby doesn’t look like a ghost. She doesn’t float and she isn’t pale and she doesn’t wear a white dress. She’s half rotted away, and she doesn’t talk. The first time she appeared, I thought it was a nightmare and I tried to wake up. When I couldn’t do it and I started to realize she was real, I screamed and cried and pulled the sheets over my head, my eyes squeezed tight and my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear her—at that point I didn’t know she was mute. But when I came out from under there some hours later, the angel baby was still there, the remnants of an old blanket draped over her shoulders like a poncho. She was pointing her finger toward the outside, toward the window and the street, and that’s how I realized it was daytime. It’s weird to see a dead person during the day. I asked her what she wanted, but all she did was keep on pointing, like we were in a horror movie.

I got up and ran to the kitchen to get the gloves I used for washing dishes. The angel baby followed me. And that was only the first sign of her demanding personality. I didn’t hesitate. I put the gloves on and grabbed her little neck and squeezed. It’s not exactly practical to try and strangle a dead person, but a girl can’t be desperate and reasonable at the same time. I didn’t even make her cough; I just got some bits of decomposing flesh stuck to my gloved fingers, and her trachea was left in full view.

So far, I had no idea that this was Angelita, my grandmother’s sister. I kept squeezing my eyes shut to see if she would disappear or I would wake up. When that didn’t work, I walked around behind her and I saw, hanging from the yellowed remains of what I now know was her pink shroud, two rudimentary little cardboard wings that had chicken feathers glued to them. Those should have disintegrated after all these years, I thought, and then I laughed a little hysterically and told myself that I had a dead baby in my kitchen, that it was my great-aunt and she could walk, even though judging by her size she hadn’t lived more than three months. I had to definitively stop thinking in terms of what was possible and what wasn’t.

I asked if she was my great-aunt Angelita—since there hadn’t been time to register her with a legal name (those were different times), they always called her by that generic name. That’s how I learned that even though she didn’t speak, she could reply by nodding. So my grandmother had been telling the truth, I thought: the bones I’d dug up when I was a kid weren’t from any chicken coop, they were the little bones of Grandma’s sister.

It was a mystery what Angelita wanted, because she didn’t do anything but nod or shake her head. But she sure did want something, and badly, because not only did she constantly keep pointing, she wouldn’t leave me alone. She followed me all over the house: she waited for me behind the curtain when I showered, she sat on the bidet anytime I was on the toilet, she stood beside the fridge while I washed dishes, and she sat beside my chair when I worked at the computer.

I went about my life more or less normally for the first week. I thought maybe the whole thing was a hallucination brought on by stress, and that she would eventually disappear. I asked for some days off work; I took sleeping pills. But the angel baby was still there, waiting beside the bed for me to wake up. Some friends came to visit me. At first I didn’t want to answer their messages or let them in, but eventually I agreed to see them, to keep them from worrying even more. I claimed mental exhaustion, and they understood; “You’ve been working like a slave,” they told me. None of them saw the angel baby. The first time my friend Marina came to visit me, I stuck the angel in the closet. But to my horror and disgust, she escaped and sat right down on the arm of the sofa with that ugly, rotting, gray-green face of hers. Marina never knew.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0871LG777
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hogarth (January 12, 2021)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ January 12, 2021
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 1650 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 181 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 178378671X

Best Sellers Rank: #26,725 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #18 in Literary Short Stories
- #23 in Hispanic American Literature
- #37 in Hispanic American Literature & Fiction

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4.2 1,341 ratings

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Mariana Enriquez
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Mariana Enriquez is a writer and editor based in Buenos Aires, where she contributes to a number of newspapers and literary journals, both fiction and nonfiction.
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Megan McDowell
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Anonymous

Wonderful, Weird, and Haunting

Reviewed in the United States on May 24, 2023

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This collection is fantastic. Every story is wonderful, and they are organized really well. The writing is beautiful and haunting. The subject matter is thought provoking. It’s horrifying, yet handled really well. This collection is weird and twisted and gorgeous.

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Summer Rain

4 Stars.

Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2023

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My first experience reading Mariana Enriquez’ work, and I am fairly impressed by the unique creativity of these stories. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is an unassuming little book of short stories with an eye-catching cover and a theme of taking place in the impoverished urban slums of Buenos Aires. These gothic tales each have incredible concepts, with eerie characters that draw you in. Reading through the book, I’ll admit that I was captivated each and every time, wondering how each would end. I even read or discussed many of them with my girlfriend.
My favorite of the stories had to be “The Well”, which began with one of my favorite Sylvia Plath quotes and set a good precedent right away. I loved the concept of a family, desperate for change, sacrificing their daughter and putting their downfalls and fears- quite literally- on her. The symbolism there is beautiful. I also enjoyed “Where Are You, Dear Heart?”, a much more gruesome and obscure story, and “Kids Who Come Back”, a story that stuck in my mind even weeks after finishing this book. “Our Lady of the Quarry” was also one of the more interesting ones.
I will admit that I enjoyed all the stories to a degree, but some of them did lay a bit odd as I read them. Not just because they were unsettling stories- and they were wonderfully translated- but there seemed to be something missing a bit from some of the stories. Maybe it’s just me, but the endings of many of the stories fell a little flat, leaving more to be desired. It could have been that they were good enough to make me want more, or maybe some of them were simply too obscure for me. Regardless, I truly loved Ms. Enriquez’ writing- and immediately bought another one of her short story books to read. Any of her works come highly recommended from me. She has a unique writing style in the world of horror, and I look forward to seeing what she comes up with; her stories carry deeper tones and messages, if you know where to look.

9 people found this helpful

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Dino

An engaging reading

Reviewed in the United States on March 9, 2022

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The Dangers of Smoking in bed is a collection of short stories with a dark tinge to it.
Not all stories are horror or supernatural, even though sometimes they can feel like stories one may tell around a camp fire. The story that gives the book its title ends in a strange but beautiful way. We cannot say that the characters are damaged people. The characters in the book vary a lot, from the functional functionary Mechi who is the protagonist in Kids Who Come Back, to the jealously bitter and revengeful girls in Our Lady of the Quarry. The characters can be people who are stuck in a situation out of their control, such as the family in The Cart, or people who are taken by madness as the teenage girls in Meat. Sometimes they are under the influence of something sobrenatural as in Back When We Talk to the Dead and The Lookout. The language flows clear and the reader feels compelled to keep reading because in those stories we cannot help but to hope for the unexpected.

9 people found this helpful

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Rochelle C.

Fun and Very Different

Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2023

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As an expat living in Argentina, I’ve decided to start incorporating some Argentinian authors into my reading and I decided to start here with Mariana Enriquez. I almost never read short stories, or macabre or dark stories, but I found it really quite enjoyable. I enjoy horror movies so this felt similar. I really enjoyed recognizing places and themes and cultural innuendos because of my time living in this country, and I’m happy I’ve decided to broaden my horizons.

2 people found this helpful

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Nick Longoria

Good book

Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2024

Would read again!

An almost aesthetic haunting

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2024

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Some of the stories felt like incomplete sketches, but almost all of them, had women characters who exemplified a lot of the teen/young angst that drives people to commit weird acts. Almost each story has a description of poverty or horror or something awful and ghastly that is so real and gentle that it makes you wonder whether the character's pain really is an act of beauty. Brilliant writing, I would probably read something more in the style of a novel than short stories though.

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2023

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Absolutely loved this. Read it for my book club and everyone loved some story in it. Very easy read. I would warn about TWs but other than that it was amazing!

One person found this helpful

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justareader

Great author!

Reviewed in the United States on July 25, 2023

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Great collection of modern horror stories that take place in South America

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Nicole

Chegou amassado

Reviewed in Brazil on November 28, 2022

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Péssimo manuseio do pacote, o livro chegou amassado.
Como a qualidade das capas gringas já é bem inferior, danifica muito fácil.

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Vaishnavi Saritha

Phenomenal. It has a bit of everything for everyone

Reviewed in India on April 16, 2024

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Some stories were eerie and terrifying than the others.
The honourable mentions are: Our lady of the Quarry
The Well
Kids who come back
Back when we talked to the dead.

Such a delighting read after a long search.

One person found this helpful

Sara

👍👍

Reviewed in Germany on January 1, 2024

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Hat alles geklappt

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a

Great stories a dark mix of horror and humour

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 2, 2023

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Wonderful set of dark tales in modern day Argentina and Spain . Good frightening reads

Emilie

Sérieusement ?

Reviewed in France on February 22, 2023

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Je ne commente pas la qualité du recueil, très imaginatif et original. Cependant j'ai acheté le livre (neuf) a Amazon et non seulement celui-ci est arrivé presque humide, mais également très sale. Pas pro du tout.

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