22 Oct 2026
Season 9 Episode 6 Club de Lectura: The Dangers of Smoking in Bed
On this week's episode we have our book club episode on The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enriquez
Across twelve stories, Enríquez introduces us to dead babies who won’t stay dead, teenage girls experimenting with supernatural forces, missing children who mysteriously return, obsessive fandom taken to horrifying extremes, witches, ghosts, curses, diseased hearts, troubled women, Ouija boards and a Buenos Aires where the boundary between ordinary life and nightmare can disappear without warning.But underneath all the supernatural horror is something much more real.These stories are haunted by Argentina itself.We talk about the history and social conditions lurking beneath Enríquez’s horror: inequality and poverty, misogyny and violence against women, urban decay, Argentina’s dictatorship and the cultural memory of the desaparecidos, and the people society would often rather ignore: the poor, the missing, the disturbed, the unwanted and the dead.We also get into the women and girls at the center of these stories.We are looking at the collection through the lens of ancestry and historical memory. In “Angelita Unearthed,” a forgotten baby buried generations earlier literally returns to haunt her family. In “The Well,” terror moves through generations of women in the same family. “Kids Who Come Back” transforms missing children into something supernatural and horrifying. And in “Back When We Talked to the Dead,” teenage girls attempt to communicate with Argentina’s disappeared through a Ouija board. Again and again, Enríquez returns to the same disturbing possibility:You can bury something without actually getting rid of it. Families can stop telling a story. Governments can erase people from records. Cities can build over violence. Communities can learn not to ask questions. Generations can inherit fears without understanding where they began.But forgetting doesn’t necessarily make the past disappear.For genealogists, that’s an especially uncomfortable idea. We spend so much time trying to uncover what was lost: breaking through brick walls, finding forgotten relatives, correcting family stories and discovering the people behind names in old records.But what if the thing your family buried was buried for a reason?And when we say we want to know everything about our ancestors…do we actually mean everything?Join us as we talk about the stories that fascinated us, the ones that completely creeped us out, etc. Because sometimes the scariest thing hiding in the family tree isn’t a ghost.It’s the truth.
Content note: This episode and the book discuss disturbing material including death, child death and disappearance, violence, sexual content, self-harm, abuse, suicide, body horror, poverty, misogyny and Argentina’s history of political violence and disappearance.
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