Horror ABCs: A Sunny Place for Shady People
Written by Emmapanada: 12/28/2024
Hello and welcome to the brand new horror novel review series, Horror ABCs! In this series I’ll be going to the horror section of various Bookstores near me and using a random number generator to find a random letter of the alphabet and buy a book from an author whose last name starts with that letter! Before we jump into the review, I want to explain my rating system for you all.
I’ll be rating books for this series on a standard 5 Star scale:
5 Stars means that I thought this book was excellent, and it had a profound emotional impact on me.
4 Stars means that this was a really, really good book. The characters and narrative were well established and explored, and I had an amazing time reading it.
3 Stars means that this was a solid book. I had my problems with it, but overall I would still recommend it to certain people and I think it’s worthwhile.
2 Stars means I was disappointed by the book for a number of reasons. However, there were still one or two things about the book that I enjoyed and I can understand that even though I didn’t enjoy it fully, I could see others liking it.
1 Star means that I really just did not connect with this book in any way.
With explanations out of the way, let’s move on to the review!
A Sunny Place for Shady People is a collection of 12 short stories written by Mariana Enriquez. From her author’s profile in the back of the book, “Mariana Enriquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. In English, she has published the novel Our Share of Night and two story collections, 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, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction, and the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction.”
I only recently started getting into the horror genre in the past 4 years, and most of that experience has only come in the form of movies and TV shows. Horror literature is something I’m still relatively new to. There were times I would read scary short stories on Reddit when I was younger or I would hear about creepypastas on the internet, and I enjoyed those for what they were despite their obvious flaws; however, I have higher expectations for short stories when they find themselves in an actual novel. I didn’t know what to expect when I first opened A Sunny Place for Shady People, because I didn’t know what form these stories from an experienced Argentinian horror novelist might take; and as I read through them I was wholly surprised that they were nothing like what I expected.
The stories themselves are often very Gothic, wherein the horror is not necessarily found in the supernatural, but in the actions and traumas of the human characters being followed. However, something that caught me off guard in this book is that each of these stories don’t have clean endings. Often they find themselves ending immediately after the horror rears its ugly head, or after the major conflict and thesis of the story is introduced. It’s strange, and it was off putting for the first half of the book as I desperately wanted more from each story, and I hoped that perhaps the stories in the second half of the book would further explore the stories in the first half. When I found that that wasn’t the case, I was conflicted, and it caused me to really question why Mariana would choose to end the stories this way, and how I truly felt about it.
I was thinking about this up until the last two chapters of the book and I came to an important realization. I hate it when the monster is revealed too early. Before the monster is revealed your imagination takes hold of the narrative and makes the monster so much scarier than it will actually be once the monster is fully revealed. So often I’ve sat and watched a movie and have really enjoyed myself, but then we see the ghost or the vampire or whatever it may be halfway through the film, and from then on the characters fully define what the monster is and how to defeat it, and it becomes so much weaker and boring in the second half. Once I thought about that in the context of this book, the stories became much more interesting to me. I wasn’t feeling fulfilled by the stories because the author was leaving various pieces of the horror as a mystery, and leaving it up to the reader’s imaginations to fill in the blanks. It became important to me to spend time with my thoughts after each story and let my imagination play out what I thought would happen next, and it became a fun thought experiment.
Although I found a way to enjoy the stories through this exercise, and I was intrigued by the way the author was ending each of these stories, in the end I still wish there was more. Mariana Enriquez has such an interesting perspective and I would have liked to see where these stories would go in her eyes, how they would have tied themselves up a bit more, or what certain things truly meant. Despite that however, I still really enjoyed my time with this book and the explorations of the different types of horror throughout and I think I’ll revisit certain stories within this book later on to see how I feel about them after I’ve experienced more horror literature.
For now though, I’m rating A Sunny Place for Shady People 3.5 Stars. Definitely a worthwhile book and something I can see a few of my friends really enjoying, as well as something that I think would be conducive to a book club or a small discussion with friends.
My top three favorite stories in this book were (in no particular order):
Black Eyes: A woman who works with supplying the homeless in her city with food and supplies one evening encounters two children with black eyes that she can immediately tell are evil asking to be let in her truck.
Metamorphosis: A woman gets surgery to remove her uterus due to a fibroid, and where it goes from there is absolutely disgusting. This is in my top three simply because I was so impressed by how uncomfortable it made me, and kudos to that.
Face of Disgrace: A woman inherits a troubling disease from her mother where her face begins to disappear. Truly upsetting in its descriptions and explorations of how that would affect a person and their family.