‘Adela’s House,’ a short story in ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’

Recommended by Laura van den Berg, Briggs-Copeland Lecturer in the Creative Writing Program; author of “The Third Hotel”

In “Adela’s House,” a brother and sister enter a derelict house, along with their neighbor, Adela. The house quickly proves to be nightmarish, possessed with its own terrible life force; once inside Adela is never seen again. While the plot summary of “Adela’s House” might sound like a conventional haunted house tale, Mariana Enríquez is after something far more charged. In her translator’s note, Megan McDowell writes that “what there is of gothic horror in the stories in ‘Things We Lost in the Fire’ mingles with and is intensified by their sharp social criticism … most of Mariana’s characters exist in a border space between the comfortable here and a vulnerable there; this latter could be a violent slum or a mysteriously living house, but it operates according to an unknown and sinister rationale, and it is frighteningly near.” In Enríquez’s hands, the house at the center of “Adela’s House” is a conduit for exploring both individual and collective trauma, for showing us just how close at hand the ghosts of the past are.