I happened upon this book by chance and decided to pick it up because I like scary stuff. Overall, there were some things that were very memorable about these stories, but in the end, I don't think it quite hit on the themes it claims it does. I also am not sure if there was anything lost in translation, so I have to evaluate my reading experience based on the English translation alone.

I think Enriquez is very good at creating unsettling supernatural characters and elements. She certainly excels at body horror and generally creates settings that feel tense, thus highlighting the unnaturalness of the environment.

However, I also think the prose tended to lean heavily on telling, which could over-explain some things while also sucking some dread out of the mood. I'm not sure if this is a reflection of the original writing or the translation, so someone who read this collection in Spanish will have to comment on that.

I'm also not entirely sure if the stories can be said to explore coherent themes. There were some that definitely felt that they were trying to do something: I loved the first story, for example, which discusses poverty and the breakdown of community and community guilt. But there were others that just kind of felt like they were being creepy and that's it. That's not a bad thing, but I'm picky.

And as a (perhaps) minor note: There is one story in here that makes use of the case of Elisa Lam. I'm not sure how to handle this story; it didn't feel overly exploitative or disrespectful, but I'm not sure how to think about fiction that plays with tragic stories when the victim's friends and families are still alive.

TL;DR: A Sunny Place for Shady People is definitely a memorable horror collection with elements that will stick in your mind. But it does have uneven prose and could have pursued some of its themes better.