The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a collection of short stories by acclaimed Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez. Published in Spanish in 2009, the collection is Enriquez’s first book of short stories; however, it is her second to appear in English, translated by Megan McDowell and published in 2021, following the success of Things We Lost in the Fire in 2017. Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed consists of 12 psychological, sociopolitical horror stories featuring mostly young female protagonists. Using the macabre, taboo, and supernatural, Enriquez explores The Manifestation of the Grotesque in Everyday Life, Isolation and the Loss of Human Connection, and The Impossibility of Hiding the Past. The collection examines the many contradictions of contemporary Argentinian life. 

This guide uses the 2021 Hogarth Kindle edition of the text.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of sexual violence, rape, mental illness, child sexual abuse, child death, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation and self-harm, substance use, addiction, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, illness, and death.

Plot Summaries

In “Angelita Unearthed,” a young woman who lives alone in Buenos Aires is surprised by the animated rotting corpse of a baby in her apartment. It is the ghost of her great aunt, who died as an infant. The baby keeps pointing south, toward the narrator’s childhood home, where her grandmother had buried the baby’s bones in the backyard. The narrator takes the baby to the house, where they discover that the new owners have dug up the backyard, and the bones are lost. The woman apologizes to the baby, who forgives her but refuses to leave her in peace.

“Our Lady of the Quarry” is about a group of teenage girls who become obsessed with an older boy called Diego. Unfortunately, Diego likes their older friend, Silvia. During the summer, the girls, along with Silvia and Diego, swim in a large quarry pool on the outskirts of the city. They show off their bodies in their swimsuits and flirt shamelessly with Diego, but they soon learn that he and Silvia are officially dating. Natalia is the angriest at the news. After Diego and Silvia play a mean prank on the girls, she snaps and summons a pack of huge dogs to attack them.

In “The Cart,” an unhoused man pushing a cart of his belongings defecates on the sidewalk of a working-class neighborhood. The narrator’s drunk neighbor attacks him, and the narrator’s mother intervenes, letting the man leave safely. Two weeks after the altercation, the neighborhood is struck by a sudden spell of misfortune. The residents lose their jobs or pensions and fall into poverty. The only ones not affected are the narrator and her family. However, they worry about their safety if their neighbors find out that they have been spared, so they decide they need to leave. They make a plan, but that night, they wake to the smell of cooking meat and see strange, black smoke billowing from the neighbor’s terrace.

In “The Well,” Josefina’s female relatives suffer from terrible fear and anxiety until they visit a witch known as “The Woman.” Josefina has a happy childhood, but after seeing The Woman, she develops a debilitating fear that prevents her from living a normal life. Years later, when she is a teenager, her sister reminds her of The Woman and suggests they visit her to see if she can cure Josefina. The Woman recognizes Josefina immediately, but she has bad news. She tells Josefina that her family members were infected by an “old evil” that she took out of them and put into Josefina. There is no way to undo the spell. Upon hearing the news, Josefina tries to throw herself into the well in the woman’s yard, but stops short, terrified of dying.

“Rambla Triste” takes place in Barcelona. Sofía arrives from Argentina to visit her friends and immediately notices a terrible stench permeating the city. Her friends, Julieta and Daniel, complain about the city’s attempts to clean up their neighborhood to make it more appealing to the influx of tourists. They go for drinks in a trendy bar, and Sofía learns that the neighborhood was previously home to children who were abused and trafficked. The next night, Sofía and Julieta go out alone. Julieta confesses that she tried to get pregnant and suffered a mental breakdown. She is recovering, but she realizes that Barcelona is haunted by the ghost children who lived and died there in poverty. She knows that Sofía can smell them, even if she can’t see them. She tells Sofía that the children want people to suffer, so they trap them in the neighborhood. She and Daniel cannot leave, but she urges Sofía to change her ticket and go as soon as possible.

In “The Lookout,” a ghost known as The Lady Upstairs haunts a hotel by the ocean and searches for a woman who can replace her and thereby set her free. Elina is a young woman staying at the hotel after suffering a bad breakup that caused her to sink into a deep depression. The Lady Upstairs is sure that Elina is the one who will replace her, and she takes the form of a young girl to lead Elina up to the hotel’s lookout tower. She plans to lock Elina in the tower so she will be forced to take her place, but as they walk up the treacherous steps, Elina is already thinking of how she can throw herself off the tower.

“Where Are You, Dear Heart?” is about an unnamed female narrator who has a sexual fetish for abnormal heartbeats. She describes her journey of sexual discovery. She has erotic memories of a friend’s father with a scar down his chest, and this man likely abused her. In her adolescence and young adulthood, she refined her understanding of her desire by reading medical textbooks like they were pornography. Eventually, the narrator joins an online fetish community where she meets a man who has a heart condition. Their erotic play becomes increasingly extreme, and the narrator knows she won’t be satisfied until she can hold her lover’s heart in her hand. When she tells him this, he tells her to find a saw.

In “Meat,” a rockstar, Santiago Espina, dies by suicide after releasing his much-anticipated second album, Meat. His legions of female teenage fans are devastated, and after his funeral, two of them, Mariela and Julieta, dig up his grave and eat their idol’s flesh. The girls are placed in a psychiatric hospital, and their act of cannibalism inspires fascination around the world. The girls refuse to speak to anyone about their act and are eventually returned to their respective homes and forbidden from speaking to one another. However, across Argentina, Espina’s fans begin receiving emails telling them to prepare for the “second coming.”

“No Birthdays or Baptisms” tells of a summer friendship between the female narrator and a man called Nico. When Nico advertises his services for film projects, a woman asks him to film her daughter Marcela’s psychotic episodes to prove to the girl that her hallucinations aren’t real. He films Marcela as she smashes herself against walls and masturbates compulsively. Afterward, he films her as she sleeps naked, her body covered in scars from cutting herself. Marcela doesn’t believe Nico’s footage, so he films her a second time, but there is still no sign of anything real haunting her. Marcela doesn’t ask Nico to film her again, but she does ask him to show her the secret footage he took of her while she was sleeping. Nico doesn’t give her the footage, but he doesn’t get rid of it, either.

In “Kids Who Come Back,” Mechi manages Buenos Aires’s archive of missing children. Her friend, Pedro, is a reporter who often uses Mechi’s archive to investigate human trafficking networks. One day, Mechi recognizes one of the missing children, a beautiful teenager called Vanadis, in the park across from her office. In another park across town, another missing boy, one who was previously found dead, also reappears. Missing children continue to reappear in parks across the city, and the collective sense of joy at this quickly turns to fear and uncertainty. None of the children have aged in the time they have been missing; they are wearing the same clothes they were last seen in and are still sporting any injuries they had. Soon, parents start to “return” their children, stating that they might look like their child, but they aren’t. Some parents even die by suicide, unable to take the stress. Frightened, Mechi quits her job and moves in with her parents as Pedro decides to leave Argentina for Brazil. Legions of returned children continue living in the city’s parks until one day they begin a “migration” to abandoned houses across the city. Mechi decides she needs to speak to Vanadis again, so she goes to the abandoned house where the girl and a number of other children are staying. The children speak to Mechi with one voice, telling her they will “come down” in the summer, and Mechi flees in terror. She thinks that she might go to Brazil with Pedro; she doesn’t want to be in the city when the children migrate again.

The title story is about Paula, an aging woman who is alone in her apartment. One night, she sees smoke rising from a neighboring apartment building. She learns that the woman who lived there was paralyzed and had fallen asleep while smoking in bed. That night, Paula makes a tent out of her sheets and smokes in bed, burning holes in her sheets until she imagines that she can see the stars above her head.

“Back When We Talked to the Dead” tells of a group of teenage girls who use a Ouija board to contact a number of spirits. One day, Julita tells her friends she wants to speak to her parents, who were disappeared during Argentina’s violent dictatorship. All the girls know someone who disappeared, except for Pinocchia, and they start trying to contact them. They are speaking to one spirit who warns that one of the girls doesn’t “belong,” when they are interrupted by Pinocchia’s handsome older brother. Pinocchia goes to help him with a chore, but when they go outside, he vanishes. Pinocchia is terrified. The other girls are sure Pinocchia is the one who doesn’t “belong,” and the spirits taunted her because she didn’t know anyone who disappeared.