A Sunny Place for Shady People by Mariana Enríquez

Book Fort Rating: 4 Stars

Is it building the Book Fort? It makes me a bit too uneasy for building, but it's welcome to watch from its own little room.

Where do I even start this review, seriously? I'm sitting here in the afterglow of this weird (wonderful) book, a little afraid to turn off the lights, and wondering when the subtle nausea might wear off

Let's start with the highlights: 

- Mariana Enríquez is a master of gothic horror elements. Reading A Sunny Place for Shady People starts off weird, and truly becomes more horrific and gut-turning with each page. The sign of a good gothic collection to me is that building sense of dread and suspense as time goes on, and this book has it in spades. The mysteriousness, the innate fear, the supernatural/paranormal elements, and the sheer emotional distress this book will have you in are *chef's kiss.*

- Each story touches deeply on topics that we as a global (yes, global) society just do not talk about enough. "My Sad Dead" looks at the impacts of untreated grief, "Face of Disgrace" touches on generational trauma, "The Suffering Woman" confronts us with what it means to be mortal, to be sick, to be dying, and how we react to others slowly decaying before our eyes. Horror without a message is not horror - it's just shock porn. This is true horror.

- Following the last point, each story is written in a way that truly challenges the reader. There is no getting around the message and the critiques Enríquez is throwing at you: you will either face your own place and viewpoint on the subject at hand (like in "My Sad Dead" -would you have let him in? or "The Refrigerator Cemetery" - would you have left him there? Are you a murderer too? Will karma come for you someday as well?), or you will drown. There is no shoving anything under the rug, here: the rug will only start screaming back at you in a truly eldritch screech.

So what didn't I love?

- There were points at which, I think possibly due to translation, the tone of many narrators felt very flat or too similar. There were some defining characteristics to each one, but they overall blended together very harshly. This may have been a statement on humanity's sameness, but I tend to think it's just translation losing a little something along the way.

- This book was very dense to read, honestly. It is wordy in a way I'm not sure it truly needs to be to get the point and horror across. Again, this could be due to translation.

- Lastly, as much as I thought it was an interesting commentary on the way people obsess over/pathologize mysterious deaths and unsolved cases (the toxic obsession with True Crime), I did not appreciate the direct use of Elisa Lam in the titular "A Sunny Place for Shady People." Perhaps this is not as frowned upon outside of the United States (especially as the case happened here), but I do think it would have been better to use a fake story clearly inspired by Elisa, rather than Elisa herself.

That all being said, you will love this book if you like horror/gothic stories, being unable to read in the dark, commentary on ableism/disability, fatphobia, generational trauma, racism, grief, etc., and eldritch horrors hiding beneath your bed. Sleep tight!

Thank you to Mariana Enríquez, Random House (Hogarth), and NetGalley for this free ARC in exchange for an honest review.