The Houseguest: And Other Stories
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3.7 • 13 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller
Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These 12 stories from D vila are the first of the Mexican author's to be translated into English and show her terrifying knack for letting horror seep into the commonplace and the domestic. In "Moses and Gaspar," a man takes in his recently deceased brother's pets and finds his life disintegrating; the story is all the more haunting because the reader never knows exactly what creatures the two pets are. In the title story, a woman's distracted husband brings a mysterious man to their house, and the woman becomes unsettled by his lurking presence. In one of the best stories, "Musique Concr te," a man's longtime friend, Marcela, discovers that her husband is cheating on her. At night, Marcela is threateningly visited by the other woman, who resembles a toad. Filled with nightmarish imagery ("Sometimes I saw hundreds of small eyes fastened to the dripping windowpanes") and creeping dread, D vila's stories plunge into the nature of fear, proving its force no matter if its origin is physical or psychological, real or imagined: "Even if is exaggerating, these things do exist and they have destroyed her, they exist like these flames dancing in the fireplace."
Customer Reviews
3.5 stars
Wish I could do half stars, 3.5 seems more accurate but I’ll round up.
Interesting stories and easy read, some make you think a little too, which is good. The only reason I am knocking out 1.5 stars is that most stories felt repetitive. Maybe I should have waited a few days before reading the next short story, as digesting these one right after the other intensifies those feelings of redundancy.