Fresh Dirt from the Grave
by Giovanna Rivero
Translated by Isabel Adey
Latin American Gothic is a gift that keeps on giving. Over the past two decades, the genre has flourished, offering readers of literary horror a fresh inflection on familiar Gothic tropes. Certain features seem to recur with striking regularity. One is the prominence of women among the genre’s leading voices, lending the field a perspective that feels distinct from more traditionally male-dominated horror. Another is the marked preference, among many of these writers, for the short story form: while there are notable novels, it seems to me that it is in shorter fiction that much of the most interesting work is being done.
While exploring this terrain, I encountered Fresh Dirt from the Grave, a collection of six stories by the Bolivian writer Giovanna Rivero. Published by the Edinburgh-based Charco Press, whose list has become synonymous with contemporary Latin American fiction, the volume appears here in an English translation by Isabel Adey, which renders Rivero’s Tierra fresca de su tumba with admirable elegance. Rivero herself is widely regarded as one of Bolivia’s most distinctive contemporary voices, her work often blurring the boundaries between gothic and speculative fiction.
What I find most compelling about Latin American Gothic is that, for all its shared motifs – atavistic rituals, the resurgence of pre-Christian or indigenous belief systems – its finest practitioners retain a strong sense of individuality. One might think, for instance, of the politically charged dread that runs through the work of Mariana Enriquez, or the uncanny “magical realist” strands of Samanta Schweblin. In Rivero’s collection, by contrast, a key theme is that of migration and displacement. “Donkey Skin” is narrated by a Bolivian gospel singer who spent her adolescence in Canada, on the margins of a Native community; “It Looks Human When It Rains” centres on an elderly Japanese immigrant confronting what may be Bolivian black magic; while “Socorro” follows a US-based psychologist returning to Bolivia with her family, only to find that “home” presents secrets and memories that are best left undisturbed.
Equally particular is Rivero’s preoccupation with relationships – between siblings, between parents and children, and in communities that one might call “chosen families”. There are moments of overt grotesquerie and body horror, as well as more recognisable Gothic devices such as the echoes of Edgar Allan Poe in the revenge stories “Blessed Are the Meek” and “Fish, Turtle, Vulture”, or the light sci-fi hints of “Kindred Deer”. Yet the most pervasive dread and unease arises in a subtler fashion – the warping of emotional bonds in spaces that ought to offer love and refuge.
Even so, the stories contain glimmers of tenderness, humour,
and a muted sense of justice. The result is a collection that is at once
unsettling and unexpectedly humane.
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