Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allen Poe, and tests the limits of fiction ... Often, what a writer doesn’t tell readers is as important as what she does tell them. Dávila, in addition to skillfully navigating elements that require a suspension of disbelief, perfectly executes this balance ... There are similarities across each of the stories within The Houseguest, but rather than being repetitive, they seem to complement one another, creating a conversation across stories ... Even when Dávila’s characters are at their most violent and insane, even when she’s at her most fantastical, her stories are wholly true.

Dávila embodies the shapeless terrors of the mind in bedrooms, basements and kitchen corners. Her inescapably bleak worlds are reminiscent of European fabulists such as Kafka and Schulz. In her fiction, the imagined can become terrifyingly real, and the real can seem imagined. She is a poet of dread and brilliantly articulates the ways it congeals and suffocates us until we are immobilised in its claws ... highly focused ... [Dávila's] intense and terrifying vision is confining—her stories darken, snuffing out hope rather than illuminating.

Dávila, who was born in 1928 and began publishing in the 1950s, could be summarized as Mexico's answer to Shirley Jackson ... Though Dávila's stories take place in Mexico, they do not work as ethnography. Readers wanting folkloric tales or tour guides into another country won't find that in these minimalist episodes ... Over and over again characters find themselves in danger, or in thrall to a horror that is not described, only hinted at ... It's hard to tell whether the characters are in fact assailed by terrifying entities or if they are simply losing their minds. After a while, there is a sameness to the proceedings (a horror which is not described threatens to plunge the protagonist into death or madness), but at her best, Dávila radiates an interesting sense of unease and calamity.

Translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson, Dávila’s stories contain a playfulness that, not unlike the work of Cortázar, can be intense and deeply unsettling in the best ways. This is a book of beautifully wrought nightmares, one that frequently leaves you searching for breath and looking over your shoulder. To read these 12 stories is to inhabit a world of strange and oftentimes gruesome ideas, all of which blur the lines of fantasy and reality ... Dávila is a master at playing, and preying, on her characters’ fears, as well as their disillusionment with the world around them. There’s a certain brutality to it, how she puts them in situations where they’re made to either continue enduring whatever madness they find themselves in or break free from it ... Even when Dávila’s characters try to do everything in their power to resist an inevitable fate, they cannot escape the page. And neither can the reader. We are trapped, held captive at the mercy of the very real and raw world of the mind — ours and the author’s. Dávila is a marvel, and this book casts a delightful and disconcerting spell.

Dávila’s output, while not prolific, is certainly profound. Unequivocally adept at ambiguity, she brings a poetic sensibility to each sentence by locating the minimum amount of detail that will produce a maximal effect. But if there is a poetic touch, it is accompanied by the sure hand of an expert narrator.

The borders between the animal, human, and spirit worlds are constantly breached in these creepy magical realist tales of grief and obsession ... Brief, macabre stories that twist our obsessions with animals and our own thoughts. Like Poe for the new millennium.

Shows [Dávila's] terrifying knack for letting horror seep into the commonplace and the domestic ... Filled with nightmarish imagery and creeping dread, Dávila’s stories plunge into the nature of fear, proving its force no matter if its origin is physical or psychological, real or imagined.