Definitely a disturbing and macabre collection of stories, but that wasn’t what I disliked about it. What I really didn’t like was that most of the stories didn’t really have a plot or resolution. They were more just a collection of creepy descriptions. These descriptions were beautifully gruesome, but they didn’t make for a good story on their own. Creepy images were dumped into the stories without context. They were definitely creepy, but there was no explanation (a shelf full of fingernails, a pantry full of maggot-infested meat). Points for creep factor, but none of the stories seemed to go anywhere and ended in weird places.

Also, the majority of the stories feature marginalized characters (homeless people, addicts, poor people, abused children, children with deformities, abused women). I was hoping the stories would bring awareness to their struggles or call out the ways these people are abused by society (police brutality). Instead, Enriquez does these populations an injustice by turning them all into disgusting villains and creepy entities in her stories. I feel like she takes advantage of their place in society and brings them down even more, making them scary, dangerous, and almost inhuman.

Since this was a translation and Enriquez is based in Buenos Aires, I’m not sure if some of the stories were lost in translation or if there were cultural things I was missing being from the United States.

This was not the book for me. While Enriquez definitely had some interesting ideas, the stories just didn’t seem to go anywhere. An interesting collection of images, but not much in the plot department.