Introduction

In Danse Macabre (1981), Stephen King distinguishes three degrees of the macabre: 1) terror, which relies on suggestion and activates the reader’s imagination, where the deepest fears reside; 2) horror, which turns to the explicit and the grotesque, embodied in the figure of the monster; and 3) revulsion, a final resource that seeks to provoke fear through the visceral, the repulsive, or the bloody. However, in La hija única (2020) by Guadalupe Nettel, a novel categorized as contemporary fiction, fear adopts a symbolic register: motherhood becomes an ominous space when it is framed as parasitism. Laura narrates the story of her friend Alina, a first‑time mother facing her baby’s illness; two complementary stories reinforce this metaphor. The following analysis examines the metaphor of parasitism.

Parasitism

Laura is presented as a woman who feels terror at the idea of having a child. Therefore, when her friend Alina confesses her desire to get pregnant, her first reaction is distance: she cannot understand how a shared aversion has turned into longing. After months of trying, Inés begins to grow in her womb. The creature brings joy that soon turns into profound fear: the diagnosis of microcephaly and lissencephaly announces that the only daughter will not survive after birth.

Simultaneously, Laura begins to worry about her neighbor Doris’s relationship with her son Nicolás. After his father’s death, the boy had developed an uncontrollable rage toward his mother. Meanwhile, a pigeon’s nest appears in Laura’s home; among the eggs, one stood out for being different, yet the bird accepted it as part of her clutch without questioning the difference.

Determined to give birth, Alina confronts the loss before it happens: the doctor tells her she must decide who will handle Inés’s death paperwork and whether she will be cremated or buried, since only Alina has that authority. A painful truth is exposed: “The truth is that in our society children are assigned to fathers optionally and to mothers by obligation” (Nettel 47). The process of accepting her daughter’s death leads her to do everything she would have wanted to do with her only child.

On May 7, Inés was born. Although she was alive, the doctors warned Alina and her husband Aurelio that the baby could die at any moment: in a few hours, perhaps tomorrow, maybe in a week, possibly in a month. That uncertainty forced them to live in fear. Deaf and blind, but alive. She will live. She will live.

During one of Nicolás’s outbursts, Doris leaves him alone in the apartment. In the following days, she stops caring for him: days spent in bed while her son ate whatever he could find. Laura, acting as a substitute mother, cared for the boy without receiving anything in return. Alina and Aurelio hire a nanny for Inés, thus repeating the parasitic cycle that runs through the entire novel.

The pigeon raised a chick that was not her own, Laura cared for Nicolás, and Marlene, the nanny hired by Alina and Aurelio, fulfilled the role of mother for Inés. Before leaving to live far away, the boy told Laura: “Tell my mom that I love her very much” (Nettel 146). That moment marks Doris’s acceptance that she does not have the tools to be a mother. That pain is comparable to the moment when “Inés babbled for the first time something that seemed to have a concrete meaning: ‘Lene’” (Nettel 132), directed not at her mother, but at Marlene, the substitute mother.

Discussion

By now it is clear that this is not a classic horror novel. So why analyze it from that angle? My answer is that the fear of a child’s death is one of the most painful fears, because it intertwines sadness and hope. When I told my mother about this story, she said something that stayed with me: “Losing your parents is terrible, but in the end it’s something that is supposed to happen. We expect it because they are older. Losing your child must be the most painful thing in life, because as a mother you always expect to die first.” That same pain runs through La hija única, where motherhood becomes an ominous space marked by fragility and loss.

Nettel writes: “You have to be very sure you want to be a mother before embarking on such an adventure” (144). And I think that even when one desires it intensely, one is never truly prepared. Alina longed for it, and surely Doris did too. Yet neither knew what they would face. On one hand, both struggle with the feeling of not being the mothers their children need. On the other, both Marlene and Laura choose to become caregivers, substitute mothers. The pigeons therefore illustrate graphically what is happening: the three stories converge in the metaphor of parasitism, where motherhood is delegated and transformed into an ominous bond.

According to the degrees presented in Danse Macabre (1981), La hija única works through subtlety: symbolic terror that is suggested, born from the deepest human fears, such as death. For this reason, although it is not a horror novel in the strict sense, in the darkness it ignites a spark that subverts the natural order: motherhood unfolds in a territory of uncertainty, suspended between life and death.

Conclusion

La hija única (2020) by Guadalupe Nettel is a novel whose terror hurts. While reading it, I felt a constant ache. I am not a mother, but I was a caregiver to my own brother, and I saw firsthand people who did not have the tools to raise a child. Alina and Doris are strong women, capable of accepting that they cannot fulfill that role, something most parents never manage to acknowledge.

That is why every word hurt, and I can say that I cried. The moments that marked me most were Nicolás’s final words to his mother and Inés’s first word. The symbolism of parasitism reveals palpable realities: some choose to be mothers, others simply cannot be.

Guadalupe Nettel is a writer who managed to unsettle me. Balancing sadness and fear is a difficult challenge, and she achieves it with a gentle prose that does not soften the experience of motherhood. Her novel shows both the beauty and the difficulties, and for that reason it deserves to be placed close to the sublime.

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The supernatural horror of Medium (2025) by Jesús Diamantino is set in motion through three suggested transgressions: the body (fragility, rupture, or deformation of the body), the spatiotemporal (a fracture in the logic of the everyday), and social paradigms (the darkness within human nature). These transgressions are the engine that turns the familiar into the uncanny and instills fear of the unknown. To this end, the novel delves into Chilean society, emphasizing anomalies in the moral perception of sexual identity, witchcraft, and religion. The threat is revealed through its system of beliefs: ghosts cross into our plane as voices demanding justice. Mediums, for their part, act as intermediaries between both worlds, attempting to battle their own demons. What follows explores these transgressive distortions in terms of atmosphere-building, as axes that not only shape the narrative but also instill in the reader a fear of the unknown.

Among Colorful Flowers

The unrest of the dead comes to life during a séance, where a mother weeps for the loss of her son. Román recognizes those words, recalling the time when, with a hammer, he took the life of a young female student. That ghostly woman, along with the rest of his victims, began to follow him amid muffled whimpers and their putrid skins.

Sofía Cantabria, Magdalena Fuentes, Blanca Domínguez, and Rafaela – Román’s mother – are all women murdered for selfish reasons: some to “save” them, others for being tumors that soiled society. Evans, a member of Román’s grandmother’s parish, helps him cover his tracks by taking the life of the medium, Portia, and later stalking those who might make him pay, to the rhythm of a macabre dance.

The silent house of pain leads Flora, the partner of Jade (Portia’s niece), to the grave. However, the detours Román takes to avoid his fate ultimately bring him face to face with those innocent women, ravenous to destroy him as he once destroyed them.

“And the dead here have a very good time

Among colorful flowers”

(Diamantino 203).

Discussion

In Medium (2025) by Jesús Diamantino, the first transgression manifests in the spiritist sessions, where the witch’s body acts as a channel through which the dead speak. This device produces a fear akin to possession and functions as a symbol of terror toward the dark arts. On this plane, Jade – the protagonist – must confront her gift in order to protect herself and those around her, turning to contact with her aunt Portia as a spiritual guide.

The second transgression, spatiotemporal in nature, introduces the fantasy of the dead as entities capable of pursuing and tormenting the living. This rupture mobilizes the logic of the narrative world and opens debates about the real existence of the supernatural, straining the boundary between the possible and the impossible.

The final transgression is the most forceful: social paradigms shatter the benevolent conception of religion and of those who profess devotion. The novel exposes the fissures in human nature, reminding us that faith does not guarantee goodness. Evans and Noemí embody this contradiction by aiding a murderer, convinced that he possessed the gift of revealing corruption within souls.

These three transgressions intertwine to shape humanity’s primordial fear: the fear of the unknown. In the novel, this fear is articulated both in the supernatural dimension – what exists beyond and how it can disturb our plane – and in the internal dimension, appealing to the darkness within human beings, the darkness we often refuse to acknowledge.

Conclusion

The novel, academic in tone, is written in a careful, gentle, and anxious prose that can captivate a reader in a single afternoon. However, the characters and the central conflict lack depth: Jade, Aurora, and Flora make implausible decisions, and the abrupt ending weakens the symbolic force that the music attempts to sustain. The only character who truly sparks interest is Román, thanks to his twisted morality.

Reading it was an experience of terror so sweet it brushed against tenderness, although that initial sensation gradually dissolved into disappointment as the pages went by. The back cover claims that Diamantino is the writer who best understands this genre in Chile, but I believe this assertion does not hold beyond the country’s borders: when set against authors such as Stephen King, Mariana Enríquez, or Liliana Colanzi, his proposal loses vigor. For all these reasons, I rate the work as stylistically noteworthy but limited in substance. It is an outstanding piece within the local sphere, though still lacking the strength necessary to compete on the international stage.

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Chaco (2020) by Liliana Colanzi is a substantial horror story that moves between innocence and guilt. Its visceral style immerses us in a tense space, capable of unsettling the reader with strange chants and with the stone as a perpetrating object. The threat, embodied in a child, splits in two: his first murder takes on moral life within the young man’s psyche. This transgression of the paradigm of childhood purity is wrapped in a hallucinogenic tone that provokes a palpable confusion in the reader. What follows is an exploration of the notion of the other self as an us.

Us

The protagonist, an eighteen‑year‑old young man with short hair, narrates his story in the Bolivian Chaco. His grandfather, who had once been a violist, now spent his days “whispering things to the alcohol” (Colanzi 6). His mother, a stutterer, became pregnant by a Tramontina pot salesman who vanished with the gust of the wind. The event that breaks normality appears as a kind of omen: the filthy mataco sleeping on the road. The young man reveals that he was drawn to that loincloth. Without trembling, he threw a stone at its skull: B L O O D spilled beneath the dead body. He took the perpetrating object home as if it were a battle memento. After that, the mataco settled into his mind: “Ayayay, it sang. Ayayay, the Avenger, the One who gives and takes away, the Killer Killer. From now on we are a single will” (Colanzi 10). His grandfather always told him that lying could kill a person. That mataco whispered that he should take revenge for the old man’s words. The stone. That was the solution. The stone. It echoed as he approached the old man, cautiously, to use his weapon against him. Seven days of agony. The house sold to pay debts, he and his mother were taken to live in a single room. However, the mother, with one sentence, shattered that false calm: “W-w-what were you d-d-doing the d-d-day the gr-grandfather f-f-fell?” (Colanzi 18). In the end, as the grandfather used to say, liars are easy to kill.

Discussion

That innocent child who listened to his grandfather vanishes the moment he throws the first stone. The perpetrating object becomes a symbol of repressed anger, of the impossibility of being himself within a town marked by rigid customs. After his mother’s abandonment, only two forces sustain him: the voice and his Savior. The young man tries to resist his impulses, clinging to the desire to find a man who will love him. However, the mataco whispers songs of vengeance, urging him toward murder. In the end, both identities merge into a single romantic idea: “yours is our voice” (Colanzi 27), after he finds the longed‑for being. Horror in Chaco (2020) manifests in the protagonist’s split personality, where morality is debated as if between an angel and a demon: one calls him to kill, the other to restrain himself. That other self, embodied in the mataco, represents his repressed nature, the space where trauma, guilt, and remorse for the first murder accumulate. The “we” thus emerges as a defense mechanism, a way of distancing himself from the internal darkness that translates into dissociative identity. For the reader, the hallucinogenic hints generate constant unease, as both voices intertwine until they distort the social systems we know.

Conclusion

Chaco (2020) by Liliana Colanzi is a story capable of disturbing from within the human psyche, where anomaly transforms into horror. The presence of a fragmented identity — one that can be interpreted as a form of dissociation — appeals to the strangeness of our nature. Everything converges in the guilt/innocence dichotomy: the image of the child shatters, and fiction blends with reality, for the protagonist could be a neighbor, a friend, or even a classmate. From my perspective as a reader, Colanzi dragged me into her world without letting me breathe. She confused my mind by presenting the hallucinatory voice and confronted me with the faint innocence still visible deep within the young man. This tension between the repressed and the innocent turns the work into an unsettling experience. For this reason, I consider Chaco an outstanding piece within contemporary Latin American horror, capable of destabilizing both individual perception and the social systems we believe to be secure.

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The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2009) by Mariana Enríquez transports us into an everyday kind of terror, where familiar places acquire ominous undertones through suggestion alone. The marginal characters in these twelve stories confront the supernatural, the hidden, and the macabre: a childhood house, a vacant lot, a well, a little cart, a seaside promenade, missing children, a rock band, a camera, ghosts, cigarettes, ouija boards, and paraphilias. In this way, everything converges so the reader lets their guard down during playful moments, only to be left stunned at the instant of revelation — a truth always camouflaged between the lines. What follows is an exploration of the story that disrupted the rhythms of my heart.

Where Are You, My Heart

A fetish is characterized by a sexual fixation on objects, situations, or body parts that do not inherently carry such connotations. When this fixation becomes a problem that interferes with daily life or becomes a necessary condition for arousal, it is referred to as a paraphilia.

In the short story Where Are You, My Heart (2009), Enríquez portrays a young woman who develops an unnamed paraphilia: an attraction to the unhealthy beating of a human heart. The beginning of this fixation appears with a man whose heart surgery went wrong, and later resurfaces through Helen Burns, the protagonist’s friend in Jane Eyre, who dies from a tuberculosis relapse. This is the first glimpse of the association forming in the young woman’s mind: she longed to witness someone’s death as a sign of love.

The obsession, gentle and gradual, grew steadily: medical textbooks became a form of pornography, and pulmonary or cardiac patients became objects of erotic fascination. She was aroused by listening to those heartbeats because their owner could die at any moment. Hours would pass as she listened to the thump‑thump‑thump, her body overwhelmed by the intensity of the sensation. Her life became interrupted by that overwhelming, almost compulsive response that pushed her to the limits of her own physical tolerance. Once she encountered that man’s trembling, faltering heartbeat — one that shook her to the core — nothing could stop her. He was gravely ill, and even so, they used medications that altered the rhythm. Enríquez writes it in a quiet, suggestive way: “We both knew how it could end, and we didn’t care.”

Discussion

Enríquez constructs terror through an atmosphere that probes the repressed and, at times, the supernatural. Each story places pressure on society, revealing hidden realities that, once exposed, provoke a kind of morbid fascination. The author plants clues that, when pieced together, reveal the ominous. In other words, we know from the beginning that the protagonist has an unusual fixation. However, as the narrative progresses, we witness how her obsession intensifies until it reaches the origin of her fantasy — the one that emerged with Helen Burns’s death: becoming aroused by the presence of a dying patient beside her.

This breaks what we understand as normal, unsettles the reader, and confronts them with scenes of self‑stimulation marked by physical harm. From there arises the inevitable question: do people like her exist in real life? And most of us would likely arrive at the same conclusion: yes, they certainly do.

Conclusion

There are many ways to construct terror in literature. Enríquez works with a kind that reveals the darkest aspects of human nature within the everyday. This causes fiction and reality to blur, resulting in a product that is, at the very least, unsettling. That very quality is what sets her work apart: the reader feels fear or discomfort. Emotions surface, grow, and then settle in once the reading is over. That breath, that silence in which the echo of the hidden message resonates, is what makes it, in my view, sublime.

Personally, reading The Dangers of Smoking in Bed (2009) was fun at first — even hilarious — until it managed to suffocate me. In the end, true to my tastes, I can say that venturing into this world was: “Good, great, all calm, all calm” (Enríquez 38).

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