The Short Stories that will keep you captivated this month: Marina Enriquez, Clare Colvin, Merce Rodoreda

A SUNNY PLACE FOR SHADY PEOPLE by Mariana Enriquez (Granta £14.99, 272pp)

A Sunny Place For Shady People is available now from the Mail Bookshop 

 There’s danger lurking in the pages of Enriquez’s latest collection of macabre Gothic short stories.

Jeopardy comes in the shape of nervy, trigger-finger gangs in the backstreets of Buenos Aires and escaped hyenas from a vandalised zoo.

But it’s the unpredictable eerie events in the lives of ordinary people that really put the frighteners on, as a character’s skin rots into corpse-like colours and faces are slowly erased into a smooth, blank nothingness (Face Of Disgrace).

At their best these stories superimpose supernatural tension on ungovernable emotions but elsewhere the shock tactics seems to be straining for effect. 

STONE CHILDREN AND OTHER STORIES by Clare Colvin (Hay Press £10, 256pp)

Stone Children and Other Stories is available now from the Mail Bookshop

 There’s a patrician quality to these pleasing short stories from historical novelist Colvin, as her characters endure bad marriages, tricky emotions, and paranormal occurrences.

A couple tackle the innards of animals in the gastronomically gruesome Le Plaisir du Chef, which takes an emotionally queasy look at falling out of love over plates of offal. 

Elsewhere, an unhappy, ghostly presence from the past takes possession of a modern woman fleeing an abusive relationship in a house graced with antique furniture (Smelling Of Roses).

It’s mostly deftly done; a stately, decorous tour of feelings, decorations and salubrious surroundings, but the occasionally hasty ending detracts from her careful observations of these floundering relationships.

JOURNEYS AND FLOWERS by Merce Rodoreda (Daunt Books £9.99, 104pp) 

This is a beguilingly strange collection of beautiful short tales, which takes the form of a meandering journey through many remarkable places and horticultural wonders.

The nameless narrator is war-weary; a feeling shared by Catalan author Rodoreda. She fled the fallout from the Spanish Civil War; hoping to find safety in France, she was forced ever onwards on foot to escape from the Nazi occupation.

The flaneur here has begun an aimless, adventurous stroll to ‘continue the endless hunt for dark hearts and unknown traditions’, each encounter unfurling like a folk tale or fable as he visits the Village Of Knitting Grandmothers, or observes the Shyness Flower, who is too diffident to be sketched. 

Spare of words, these gorgeous, hypnotic vignettes contain whole worlds of sorrow and joy.