The following version of this book was used to create the guide: Enriquez, Mariana. The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Penguin Random House LLC, 2021.

Mariana Enriquez's The Dangers of Smoking in Bed is a collection of 12 short stories. Each of the short stories is written from a distinct point of view and employs its own unique narrative form, structure, and style. The following summary relies upon the present tense and a linear mode of explanation.

In "Angelita Unearthed," the first person narrator discovers a set of bones in her backyard after a rainstorm. When her grandmother sees the bones, she insists they belong to her deceased baby sister. The narrator does not believe her grandmother, until the baby comes to haunt her 10 years later. Though she is initially afraid of the baby, she eventually grows accustomed to her.

In "Our Lady of the Quarry," a group of school girls becomes obsessed with an attractive young man named Diego. They are desperate to win Diego's affection and destroy his girlfriend Silvia. When Diego and Silvia play a trick on the girls while swimming at the Virgin's Pool quarry one day, one of the girls, Natalia, becomes so furious that she asks the Virgin to unleash wild dogs on Diego and Silvia.

In "The Cart," after a homeless man defecates on the streets of her neighborhood, the narrator watches her mother intervene. Her mother does not like the way the neighbors are persecuting the homeless man. The homeless man leaves unharmed, but the neighbors make him abandon his cart of junk. The cart soon curses the neighborhood, and every household but the narrator's falls into ruin.

In "The Well," Josefina fears nothing until the day she and her family visit a witch they call The Woman. Years later, Josefina is so desperate to eradicate her plaguing anxieties, that she returns to The Woman's house. The Woman says there is nothing she can do to help her. She placed her family members' fears onto Josefina, believing she could withstand them. Josefina wants to throw herself into The Woman's well and die, but is too afraid to jump.

In "Rambla Triste," as soon as Sofía lands in Barcelona, she encounters a terrible odor. She does not tell her friends, Julieta and Daniel, about the smell, because she does not want to sound like a snooty tourist. Two days later, Julieta tells Sofía that the smell is that of the dead children who haunt the city. If Sofía wants to escape the children's clutches, she must return to Argentina at once.

In "The Lookout," The Lady Upstairs is a ghost trapped in an Ostende hotel. Tired of haunting the establishment, The Lady seeks out a successor from among the hotel's summer guests. Finally a disturbed young woman named Elina comes to visit. The Lady thinks she will make an ideal successor because no one will miss her when she is gone.

In "Where Are You, Dear Heart?," a young woman is disturbed by her own sexual fetishes. She does everything in her power to understand why she is so obsessed with sick people, and what about them sexually excites her. After establishing a distorted relationship with a sick man, she blames another man from her childhood for her odd sexual cravings.

In "Meat," Julieta and Mariela are obsessed with the pop star Santiago Espina. After Espina kills himself, the girls' obsession only grows. They sneak into the cemetery where he is buried, dig up his grave, exhume his body, and eat his remains. Afterwards, they establish a cult following.

In "No Birthdays or Baptisms," the first person narrator becomes friends with a videographer named Nico. She gets involved with Nico's odd video projects. The new friends are especially intrigued by a client named Marcela. Watching the footage of Marcela's psychotic fits together, the friends realize that there is something so disturbing about the young girl that they cannot maintain their friendship.

In "Kids Who Come Back," Mechi gets a job maintaining Buenos Aires' archive of lost and disappeared children. Initially, the work is rewarding. However, when a litany of lost and dead children begin flooding the Buenos Aires parks, Mechi feels incapable of keeping her job or staying in the city.

In "The Dangers of Smoking in Bed," Paula lives in an apartment infested with butterfly-moths. One night she wakes up to the odor not of burning moths, but of burning flesh. One of her neighbors lit herself on fire while smoking in bed. In her own bed, Paula makes a tent with her sheet, and smokes underneath. The cigarette catches the sheet on fire, making holes that resemble stars above Paula.

In "Back When We Talked to the Dead," the narrator and her friends start spending all of their time playing with a Ouija board. One night, they decide to contact the spirits of all the people they have known who have disappeared. Amidst their game, a spirit visits and tries to capture one of the girls. They are so terrified that they stop playing with the board and spending time with one another.