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. M… - Mariana Enriquez

I think no one really chooses their tastes or their modes of expression: One day a language appears, and finding a language is a lot like finding a home. When I discovered horror cinema and literature, I found my language — the one that allowed me to talk about the terrors I have known. My language was formed by Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights”; the stories of Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar and Stephen King; “Frankenstein”; “The Exorcist”; “Jaws” and “E.T.”; and later by “Twin Peaks”; rock and punk music; David Cronenberg; Clive Barker and fanzines.

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.

to a large extent, this is the fear that I summon and depict, a feeling of simultaneous imminence and abandonment that is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn’t experienced it.