Bajar es lo peor

Mariana Enriquez's first novel: three teenagers peer into the abyss of drugs, destruction and love. In the nocturnal, sordid and vibrant Buenos Aires of the nineties of the last century two characters move: Facundo, a young man of unattainable beauty who prostitutes himself to survive and is afraid to sleep alone because of the nightmares he suffers, and Narval, a boy haunted by dark beings and macabre hallucinations. A third character, the unstable Carolina, completes the trio, who looks into the abyss of drugs, violence, destruction and love. Written when she was nineteen years old and published in 1995, when the author was twenty-one, this first novel by Mariana Enriquez was out of print for many years and became a cult work. Going Down is the Worst gives access to the origins of Enriquez's powerful writing and shows how many of the obsessions that will shape her literary universe already appear in her debut as a narrator. But the rescue of the work is not only due to archaeological reasons, because, beyond them, the text has vigorously resisted the passage of time, and its reading allows us to discover that it is not a hesitant first-time novel at all. It is a vampire novel without vampires and a gothic novel without haunted castles, full of curses with echoes of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, and with an underground, dark and punk rock soundtrack. It is a cross between Gus Van Sant's My Private Idaho and Interview with the Vampire, as the author confesses in the prologue. And it is, above all, a dark and fascinating story of teenagers turned into fallen angels, in which death and beauty intersect.