Twelve stories move through contemporary Buenos Aires—and briefly Barcelona and Belgium—following teenage girls, poor women, and ghosts as the ordinary pressures of poverty, desire, and Argentina's dictatorship-haunted past curdle into something uncanny and bodily. Mariana Enríquez fuses street-level realism with horror's oldest tricks.
The most unsettling fear is not of a distant, unknown realm but of the familiar turning dangerous: your own body, your mind, your neighbours, your family. Realising that ordinary daily life could itself be terrifying unsettles more than any faraway monster.
At a certain young age there is music playing in your head all the time, as if a radio were broadcasting from inside your skull. One day that music grows softer, or simply stops, marking the quiet end of that intensity.
Those who usually have no power, such as hungry women, the poor of the slums and dead children, are the ones who gain frightening supernatural force. Once they have it, they show no interest in being reasonable.
A person in desperate need stops weighing what is sensible and acts anyway. In the book's words, a girl can't be desperate and reasonable at the same time. The single-minded intensity of adolescent longing can curdle into jealousy fierce enough to turn murderous.