I think what happened to people like me who grew up in the 80s and 90s is that slasher movies, Stephen King and Twin Peaks all got mixed with our rea… - Mariana Enriquez

I am a writer who works in her country, who never lived anywhere else, who maybe will one day, but whose life has transpired in a large American metropolis with all its intensity, its often joyful — and other times desperate — people, its power outages, its bodies in the streets, its beauty and its horror.

I understand the [notion of] respect but I don’t want to be complicit in any kind of silence; to be timid about horrifying things is dangerous too. Maybe I turn up the volume to 11 because of the genre I like to work in, but the genre puts a light on the real horror that gets lost in [a phrase like] “political violence”.

I grew up in a shadowy world where death was all around, but it was secret — disappearances have all the direct cruelty of sadism, as well as a particular aura of the sinister unknown.