Real monsters

Speaking the language of fear

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  • Published 20250805
  • ISBN: 978-1-923213-10-4
  • Extent: 236pp
  • Paperback, eBook, PDF

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was lucky enough to interview the Argentinian writer Mariana Enríquez at Sydney Writers’ Festival. Enríquez’s fiction overlays the real horrors of Argentina’s military dictatorship – the years of forced disappearances, state terrorism and human rights violations; the subsequent decades of psychological and political fallout – with the horrors of imagination: monstrous bodies, restless spirits, malevolent entities. 

For Enríquez, realism is an inadequate schema for expressing the manifold mysteries and terrors of existence. But the language of horror, with its ability to conjure the unthinkable, to trace the contours of our deepest fears and darkest imaginings, can lead us into those shadowy corners of the human psyche, giving us permission to peer into the gloomy space under the bed or creak open the door to the basement. It allows us to sit with the uncertainties of life: fiction, Enríquez told me, is the place where we can exorcise our curiosity, ‘the place where we can make a mess’.

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