Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, Two Lines Press, 2024
For some time now, Latin American literature has engrossed readers with magical realism, fantasy, surrealism, and most recently, horror. These aren’t necessarily the stories of the region’s most considered authors—Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Horacio Quiroga, Amparo Dávila, and other giants among them—but rather the work of bold, fearless, and independent writers who, in the last decade, have honored and twisted these genres in unprecedented ways. Their work represents a new generation of talents, who are redefining their region’s legacy in gothic literature.
Many call it horror. Others, like Carmen Alemany Bay, a literary scholar at the University of Alicante, call it “narrativa de lo inusual”—narrative of the unusual, or the strange, defining a subgenre “in which the reader is ultimately the one who decides what is possible and what is not.” Whatever one wants to call it, the certainty remains that these voices are as powerful as they are unflinching, grounded by a sincerity and authenticity faithful to their geographies; that is to say, these stories are as “unusual” as they are Latin American, which is in part what makes Through the Night Like a Snake all the more visceral.
As the ninth installment of Calico, a book series devoted to vanguard works in translation, Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories presents a collection that upsets our conventional understanding of horror. In ten tales authored by writers hailing from Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Chile, readers can find prose that utilizes symbolic imagery, political hypocrisy, mortality, and feminism to unsettle and subtly terrorize. In one case, a lonely, bored mother finds a renewed (yet dire) sense of purpose when an alien comes to visit. In another, a man learns of his former best friend’s obsession with a dead fascist, leading him down a fantastic and surreal labyrinth of despair. Keeping with the title’s imagery, the horror in all of these stories slithers in stealthily, preferring to hide around the corner, keeping on the sly, waiting to capture its prey. Only, instead of pouncing, it quietly intoxicates, revealing its true colors in a hypnotizing fashion.
Despite the dizzying effect common to each story, there are no two alike—in large part due to their strong and distinct voices and unique structures. While some prefer to anchor their narrative in descriptive and lyrical language, others are self-aware and confessional. “Soroche” by Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker and Noele de la Paz, submerges the reader into a microscopic scandal when a recently divorced woman’s reputation and self-confidence immediately collapses in the aftermath of a leaked sex tape, leading to catastrophic extremes. This is the story of Ana, but the diegesis is established through a series of monologues from her closest friends, Karina and Viviana. In the wake of the leaked tape, we begin to learn of the feminist hypocrisy, internalized misogyny, and insincerity within all these women. “The truth is the truth,” one of them comments, “and the truth is she looks awfully fat, like a walrus, oof! Hideous, the poor girl!” Ana’s aware that everyone close to her has seen the video, including her own children, but what about her friends—and especially those who have sworn unconditional love? How do they feel about Ana at her weakest moment? Will they protect her? Do they really love her? The duplicitousness implicating these intimate relationships is laid bare by scathing repudiations:
Don’t go believing she was depressed over the divorce: it wasn’t that, it was because everyone got to see her jiggly, saggy, deflated tits, her gargantuan nipples, her cellulitis, her varicose veins, the horrific way her blubber moved while—well you know, right?—as if making waves.
Ojeda portrays a group of women at their most despicable, in language that is crude, vile, and incredibly violent. It carries on throughout like a Greek chorus, in the style of gossip and chatter, transmitted through whispers and snide remarks at dinner parties, lunch dates, and shopping appointments. “No one will respect her”; “I feel sorry for her”; “I feel so bad for her.”
Just as the chatter becomes all too-consuming, so does the horror we witness firsthand through Ana’s own psychological demise. She’s heartbroken, raging, then finally, she directs the hate towards herself. It’s self-deprecation at its most brutal, a growing litany of revilements: “. . . my armadillo skin, my manatee skin, my turtle skin, my rat skin, my cairn skin, my tapir skin, my cockroach skin. . . Because that’s what I am, a creature that urinates on what is beautiful.”
Ana at her most vulnerable, her most anguished and desperate, is also a singular representation of a woman whose right to feel both beautiful and ugly is validated and denied only through sex. She is someone not looking for pleasure but physical intimacy, someone looking for love:
. . . how awful it is to be so hideous and yet so alive and to exist in the midst of the most absolute beauty, waiting forever and ever for someone to desire the undesirable, waiting forever and ever for someone to cherish my body and make it beautiful with his love. About love and ugliness. About how ugliness always wins.
Her pain is raw, agonizing, and all the more terrorizing given the surrounding vicious circle of heartless voices, and it is in passages such as these where the work of the translation begins to shine. The rhythm and cadence of the language never falters or stops short; it follows to the very end.
Each story has a different translator, and in some instances, it is clear that the relationship between author and translator has been grounded by experience and time. This is the case with Argentine Camila Sosa Villada’s “The House of Compassion,” the tenth story in the series. Translated by Kit Maude, the story explores the darkness within a gothic nunnery, presenting us with the traumatic backstory of a transgender sex worker—someone who had experienced abuse as a young person, which leads her to weaponize her own sexuality, on her own terms. The drawback, however, is what happens when her seductive powers go awry, guiding her right back into the vicious cycle of physical and emotional abuse she once dreamt of leaving. It unfolds cinematically, as if written for the screen (perhaps not surprising given that Villada is a former actress), and Maude has a sixth sense for such idiosyncratic storytelling preferences, given he’s already translated much of Villada’s previous work, including a novel (Las Malas) and a collection of short stories (I’m a Fool to Want You).
On more than one occasion, the task calls for two translators. In “Lazarus the Vulture” by Claudia Hernández, translators Julia Sanches and Johanna Warren unambiguously hone in on the two-faced, menacing threat between a civilian and a man-like vulture, whose friendship turns dark. The language is sincere and upfront until it’s not, signaling a betrayal soon after. The Kafkaesque tale opens and closes with death, flustering our perceptions of perpetrator/victim relations.
There’s a duality present in this collection; however unprecedented these works are, they don’t shy away from traditional literary devices like symbolism to flesh out emotional depth. In many cases, however, their employment is quite conventional, as in “That Summer in the Dark,” by Mariana Enriquez and translated by Megan McDowell. Perhaps the most self-aware of them all, this story follows two teenage goth girls in the hot and boring summer of 1989 Argentina. “Everywhere was the same, no electricity, no money, no work, no spirit.” In this dreary atmosphere, the pair are fascinated—no, obsessed—with serial killers, and are continuously dismayed when reminded that Latin America holds no grim legacy as that of the United States. Death to them is exciting, riveting, and almost sexual, but everything changes when they learn that their neighbor has murdered his wife and daughter in the dead of the night. All of a sudden, curiosity takes over the young women, and fear and paranoia will lead them to despair.
Enriquez’s symbolic imagery sharpens the significance of the story, tapping into society’s unduly intrigue with death and the countless ways we glamorize or romanticize death in popular media such as TV documentaries, films, news segments, magazine articles, books, dramas, and more. She uses the murdering neighbor as a prototypical portrait of popular serial killers—a man with a mysterious, feral quality (“He swam with the long strokes of a professional and emerged shaking himself dry like a dog”) who murders his beautiful wife (“I imagined her on pointe, with theatrical makeup a bun, as the black swan”)—to facilitate our understanding of the conflict at hand, but she also draws out and capitalizes on the story’s setting to induce the horror. The political subtext, which includes ignorance, bigotry, homophobia, suffering, bystandership, sexism, and misogyny, are all the more terrifying when portioned against the languid texture of a hot summer in a cheap housing complex. While the two girls float through life with a virginal innocence and naivete, their surroundings become complacent, comfortable even, in the face of death. The fear arises not from the murderer living above death-curious teenagers, but by the slow decay and depravity of a nation struck by political and economic apathy.
It is precisely this extra-narrative awareness that drives so much of the “unusual” in these stories. These are tales that are grounded by textures, tones, and colors, ascribing equal quality to their places as they do to their characters. In “Rabbits” by Antonio Díaz Oliva and translated by Lisa Dillman, a Chilean man tells the story of how he escaped a military-controlled commune. Though the language is ruminative, even at times nostalgic (“On the inside we had food, shelter, and a spiritual refuge. . . the three elements every human being needs”), it’s a heartbreaking story about the traumatic, yet unbreakable bonds we have to the places we grow up in. In another political bend, however, it also extends one’s disappointment with government institutions; when the unnamed narrator finds out that he’s been kept trapped and siloed from the outside world by the military, and forced to live in a commune that tortures and kills, his quest for survival throws him into the throes of poverty and homelessness. There was never anything morally admirable about the institutions built to protect us, because when they have, they’ve done so with violence and ruthlessness.
Earlier I mentioned Carmen Alemany Bay, a scholar and literature professor based in Spain. The essay in which she cites the “narrative of the unusual” was in large part a response to the growing number of female writers in Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador, and beyond, who are increasingly gravitating towards horror and the unfamiliar for the purpose of unsettling readers and critiquing social ills. According to Alemany Bay, this last generation of female writers are narrating “from the other side of reality,” perhaps because more and more women in the region have reached unprecedented levels of empowerment. It’s fair to say that Through the Night Like a Snake isn’t wholly feminist, but it’s also fair to point out that six out of ten stories are written by women, and seven are told through the perspective of a female or female-identifying individual. These stories highlight the feminist sensibility in a region fraught with high levels of femicide, stagnant numbers of female representation in legislation, and a general culture of misogyny. Through them, we can witness firsthand the plight of a Bolivian woman struggling to conceive in a foreign country, or the bitter loneliness of a mother estranged by her ungrateful son. Such stories don’t blatantly critique their region’s social norms, but rather tie in the emotional, complex truth of being a woman with the thread of the mysterious, the supernatural, and the gothic—all to create a fabric of luminous Latin American literature. They are gripping not only because of their action, but because of the subtlety with which the unusual creeps. The horrors are muted, though palpably unsettling. It’s not until you move on to the next story that the fear rears vividly. You can’t help but close your eyes, cover your ears, and shut the book—but immediately, you’ll open it back up for more.
Sharon Beriro is a writer and producer living in the United States. She is a lover of literature and Criterion Blu-Rays.
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