Terrible Shadow: 10 Stories of Argentine Rural Gothic

About the book

Terrible Shadow: 10 Stories of Argentine Rural Gothic is a collection of contemporary short stories that explore one of the most unsettling themes in Argentine literature: the encounter between humanity and a wild, strange, and deeply disturbing natural world.

Curated by Marcelo Acevedo, this anthology offers a compelling overview of today’s rural Gothic writing: ten short stories, some by renowned, others by up-and-coming authors, who reimagine the horror genre through a distinctly local lens. Here, the Pampas, the jungle, or the desert take the place of European castles, while the supernatural emerges from making contact with an ancestral landscape that seems to be keeping an eye on us.

A book to discover how Argentina can also be fertile land for horror stories to grow and flourish.

Excerpt

PROLOGUE

Almost two hundred years after the emergence of the Generation of 1837—a group of Argentine writers and intellectuals whose seminal works shaped Argentine fiction—the fusion of Gothic elements with rural settings continues to have a powerful influence in our fiction. Nowadays, a group of writers, including Diego Muzzio, Luciano Lamberti, Mariana Enriquez, Samanta Schweblin, Leonardo Oyola, Fabián Casas, and Selva Almada—to name just a few—are writing stories set in the plains, jungles, forests, deserts, or small towns of Argentina’s countryside. These stories and novels could be seen as an offshoot of Gothic literature, in which the narrative mechanisms of horror are expressed through a sense of the ominous, feelings of estrangement, oppressive atmospheres, violence, rural legends, and the central role of nature.

“From its very beginnings, Argentine literature sought to carve out a space in which to imprint its symbols, its dramas, and its characters,” writes Fermín Rodríguez in his essay Un desierto para la nación. That space was the arid region of the Pampas, a land that in the early 19th century was still considered a desert and became the primary setting for the birth of Argentine narrative literature.

In his most famous reading hypothesis, David Viñas claims that Argentine literature begins with a rape. This foundational rape—which, strictly speaking, is never actually perpetrated—is found at the climax of Esteban Echeverría’s short story El matadero (The Slaughterhouse), in which a group of Rosas henchmen working in a slaughterhouse under the federalist regime—following a feast of blood and bovine guts, complete with the decapitation of a child—torture and attempt to rape a young unitarian man in the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Ricardo Piglia, in his essay Echeverría y el lugar de la ficción, proposes that Argentine narrative started with two foundational works: El matadero, and the first page of Sarmiento’s Facundo, with its invocation of the ghost of the Tiger of the Plains. Carlos Gamerro also supports the idea of two foundational works of Argentine literature, but by a single author. In El nacimiento de la literatura argentina y otros ensayos, he writes: “Argentine literature got off to a very good start and a very bad one at the same time, and at the hands of the same person. El matadero is a strong contender for one of our best works of fiction and is, without a doubt, the first one that is worth the while. The narrative poem La cautiva, on the other hand, is terrible.” And so, Gamerro proposes La cautiva as a third foundational literary work, following those already proposed by Viñas and Piglia, and views it as the conjoined twin of El matadero, as the two texts are always published jointly and used in Argentine schools as a pair. And in spite of his disparaging comment about La cautiva, for Gamerro it has greater historical importance than its twin, which was written in 1840 but was not published until 1871, after Facundo and the early gaucho poetry had already appeared.

So, if we start with the premise that the debate over the origins of vernacular narrative literature could be settled with these three seminal works by two of the leading figures of the Generation of 1837, even a cursory reading of El matadero, La cautiva, and Facundo o Civilización y barbarie en las pampas argentinas (Facundo: or Civilization and Barbarism) inevitably leads us to the conclusion that the Argentine countryside—with particular emphasis on the Pampas region—emerges as the primary setting for this new genre, just as blood, violence, the supernatural, and a certain affinity with the Gothic style were also key elements in forging a distinct literary tradition.

[…]

In today’s literary scene, this tradition seems to have made a strong comeback. Over the past ten years, many of the horror films produced in Argentina have had certain qualities that link them together: they are set in small towns in the countryside, far from urban areas—if not directly in rural settings, in the jungle, or in the heart of the Pampas desert—and draw on the tools and aesthetics of the Gothic genre, but with native characteristics, giving our folkloric traditions and rural spaces a central role. Leonardo Oyola, for instance, uses the myth of the “Familiar”—a cursed spirit in the form of a black dog—to tell the story El fantasma y la oscuridad (from Sultanes del ritmo, 2016), a horror story set in a sugar mill in Tucumán in the midst of the military dictatorship. Marina Closs chooses that terrifying and popular creature, which is part of the rural folklore of northern Argentina, as the narrator of her short story Pombero (Pombero, 2023). Mariano Quirós, in his short story Mi mujer y su chupacabras (from Campo del cielo, 2019), uses the figure of the cryptid popularly known as the chupacabra to tell the story of a couple of tourists set in southeastern Chaco. Meanwhile, Fabián Casas set his novel El parche caliente (2023) in the Pampas desert, crafting a twisted take on the legend of the “lobizón” or werewolf, in a story that draws on both the gaucho literary tradition and the fantasy literature of the Argentine-Uruguayan region.

[…]

In Argentina’s rural Gothic literature, there are no crumbling castles or large, run-down mansions; instead, that space is taken up by natural, wild, and violent landscapes: the “natural-strange” or “weird nature.” If, as Ricardo Piglia said, the only truly ancient thing in the New World is the jungle, then the Gothic novel in the Americas must draw its terrifying imagery from the most archaic heritage: the jungle, the desert, the Pampas plains, and their inhabitants, as if they were the proxies for the castles, nobles, and maidens of European Gothic literature. The characters’ encounter with nature untouched by human hands becomes a complex, almost religious experience—a connection not only with the divine, but also with the unknown and the incomprehensible. That hostile natural environment can be represented by a polluted stream, as in Samanta Schweblin’s novel Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2014)—which combines themes such as ecocide with popular beliefs, folk healing practices, and the migration of souls—, or a muddy forest littered with pieces of rusty metal and decomposing animal carcasses where the brother of the main character in Luciano Lamberti’s story La canción que cantábamos todos los días (from El loro que podía adivinar el futuro, 2014) goes missing. It can also be embodied in in our region’s climate, a crucial factor in many of these stories: the oppressive heat, the humidity, the storms… the climate is nature in its wildest and most primitive state; it is that which humans cannot yet tame as if it were a horse, nor modify at will as if it were virgin land. Just like in El matadero, where everything begins with a fierce storm that floods the town with mud and sewage and deprives it of the much-desired cow meat, or in Borges’s El Evangelio según Marcos (The Gospel according to Mark), where a storm causes a river to overflow and floods the roads, forcing the main character to stay at a ranch in Junín and face his tragic fate, in 21st-century rural Gothic novels such as El viento que arrasa (The Wind that Lays Waste, 2012) by Selva Almada, the characters are at the mercy of extreme heat and latent violence as they await an epic storm, and in El eterno silencio (2020) by Eduardo Blaustein, the main character, a loner with a dark past, lives on a ranch in the middle of nowhere, at the mercy of a sticky, ominous fog that shrouds the rural landscape…

[…]

The idea behind this anthology is to provide an overview of the current landscape—a compendium of authors, some renowned, some emerging—who, each in their own way, take this imagery and expand it into new literary dimensions. The journey begins with pioneering works by two must-read writers, Juana Manuela Gorriti and Ada María Elflein, written between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, then moves on to the stories of Juan Machado and Vicky García, which display clear influences from the gaucho tradition and the Gothic Romanticism of the Generation of 1837. We are presented with a blend of true historical events and traditional European tales of witches in Flor Canosa’s story, or in the “small town, big hell” narratives of Mariano Quirós, Luciano Lamberti, and Leandro Ávalos Blacha, all the way to the apocalyptic and weird rural neo-Gothic works of Roberto Chuit Roganovich and Juan Mattio.

[…]

Translated by Lucía Ronco - Edited by Marita Propato