Sometimes when I walk around Melbourne, I always feel ghosts around me. It is a distinctly strange experience to walk on lands with such a haunting and violent history, yet I was never able to grasp it, to describe or put it into words. I was simply not talented enough.

But that is what Mariana Enríquez so ingeniously writes about in her novels. She views the horror genre and ghosts as not a mystical escape, but a mode of seeing. Ghosts in her world don't just serve as metaphors but are real, capturing emotions and memories. This is how Enríquez, inspired by her grandmother who told her horror folklore growing up, keeps in touch with her roots.

This is what I particularly found interesting during her talk at the Melbourne Writers Festival. She spoke on how she uses the horror genre, known for being far removed from reality, to explore and make sharp critiques on real topics. Setting often forms her work - specifically her home city of Buenos Aires. She described it as haunted, due to the violent actions of its authoritarian regime, and how so many secrets are now accessible after its collapse in 1983 - revealing a new version of reality. She uses her writing to reconcile between this hidden version of society and the clean version that’s revealed to the public. Sometimes reality feels like fiction, and sometimes it is even more far-fetched than what fiction can even imagine. Because of the shape of Argentina’s autocracy, a military junta consisting of multiple autocrats essentially meant that “power was not in one place, it was shapeshifting,”. Thus, in Enríquez’ writing, it is often the setting that’s haunted, there is no one clear antagonist or victim.

Her take on body horror disrupts the typical conventions of the genre, changing the way I view it. While I am usually a hater of body horror, as I find it is often employed as an obnoxious way to shock viewers without saying anything substantive, Enríquez packs it with meaning. She uses body horror to represent what she describes as “non normative bodies,” such as queer, disabled or ill bodies. She highlights how illness, something that happens to everybody, is incredibly underrepresented, and she viewed the only way to adequately do it justice through her writing is to make it “absurd and crazy,”.

Enríquez herself was a very captivating person. Her humour was dry, yet witty and sharp with her voice unchanging when she talks about anything between childhood trauma to sarcastic comments about the Argentinian president’s cloned dog named after neoliberal economists he is obsessed with. She was filled with contradictions, she was talking about such dark and serious topics while wearing an eclectic outfit, she was very laid back but also stern and she sat up but also hunched forward.

The moderator, Beejay Silcox, was a very good match for Enríquez. An unashamed fangirl, Silcox understood Enríquez’s novels as if they were her own, which made their conversations all the more enlightening. Her questions were incredibly open-ended yet specific, allowing Enríquez to brush out all the tangled thoughts in her mind and share them with us. Silcox was the complete opposite of Enríquez - if Enríquez is the epitome of nonchalance, then Silcox is indeed very chalant. 

Having a peek into Mariana Enriquez’s mind, which I can only imagine is a vast, complicated labyrinth filled with hidden monsters and wise ghosts, will be a prized experience that I will cherish forever.