Beautifully translated by Megan McDowell, in prose that shimmers with a sort of menacing lyricism, the stories of Good and Evil are powerfully evocative and unsettling. They seem to hover, indeed like fever dreams, between the reassuring familiarities of domestic life and the stark, unpredictable, visionary flights of the unconscious.
Masterly ... Quiet, devastating lucidity is a hallmark of Schweblin’s prose, captured with magnificent precision in a long-standing collaboration with translator Megan McDowell ... We have the impression of a writer absolutely and entirely in control, as Schweblin’s meticulous clarity is never compromised by the horror of her subjects. But if we trust her to take us to the bottom, almost always she will reward us with a glimmer.
Schweblin’s prose, translated with exquisite precision by her regular translator Megan McDowell, avoids all the stylistic traps of the generically mystical. There is no gauziness, no obfuscatory veil. Schweblin’s aim is neither to mystify nor to distort. Instead, she looks at the world directly, piercing its deceptive surface ... Such directness and clarity of language opens a unique emotional terrain where fear and compassion conjoin. For Schweblin, the state of porousness and fragility that arouses terror is also precisely the state through which we access that which fear holds out of reach.
Samanta Schweblin is the master of dread. Her stories are part of the growing literary movement that mixes psychological and social realism with touches of horror and suspense ... This new collection...will pull in readers and leave them, shivering, in the dark ... This is what has made Schweblin the icon of a rising genre, a master of the unsettling short tale. She unsettles readers, leaves them uncertain, leaves her protagonists still trembling. Inhabiting one moment of their lives forever, repeating it constantly, turning it over in their hands. Schweblin evokes our own darkest fears and deepest hurts. She reaches into a hole in her throat and touches something deep within all of us, a probing hurt that aches in all of our chests the same. She evokes dread, grief, death, fear, illuminates them, and leaves the reader to mediate within them—to turn her questions over in their hands, and see how they illuminate our own inner shadows.
Strange and powerful ... The Argentine author...delivers a blend of superstition, dread and a leitmotif of mental instability in a register of acute psychological realism.
Remarkable ... Schweblin is a modern master of uncanny fiction, and she subtly, dreadfully parades around among the literary in these six stories of hauntings, living deaths, and gothic horror ... The book, excellently translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is full of glimpses of terror and glancing surreality, artfully using the techniques of genre fiction to ratchet up tension in the service of stories with a human core of sadness and guilt ... Schweblin is one of the great current writers of ‘art-dread’ ... [An] exceptional sense of mood and affect [is] established through foreshadowing and narrative manipulations of the passage of time ... A masterful interlude: narratively and affectively fascinating while simultaneously throwing the reader off-balance ... Exceptional.
Schweblin’s slicing open of her characters risks becoming a repetitive, tired formula ... Yet there is a subtler, richer theme in this collection ... In these stories, one character is often trying to teach another a lesson; the most successful complicate what a lesson is.
Disquieting, seductive ... Deftly mine the fears and neuroses we go to great lengths to hide ... Unsentimental yet lyrical, succinct yet evocative ... Dramatically focuses on an obsessive return to the pain and suffering of the narrator’s original trauma and insists on its value.
