I loved Tender Is The Flesh so I was really looking forward to this one. I’m gutted to say, it really wasn’t for me.

I liked the idea of a short story collection, I always like the pace of these and find you can fly through them. This one I struggled with.

Some of the stories I enjoyed but most of them I either didn’t understand or found them a little nothing? I don’t know, it’s probably more of a me thing than the book though.

I wouldn’t tell anyone not to read it, because it’s all a personal thing. It’s just not been a favourite for me. I do love the author though and won’t be deterred from reading more in the future just because of this one.

Sorry 🙃

This was such a beautifully written book, i read it in one sitting it had me hooked. A few of the stories fell flat for me but overall i really enjoyed the book and it was a fast read.

I really loved ‘Tender is the Flesh’, so I was really excited to read the short story collection of Augustina. Sadly this wasn’t for me. There were two stories which I really enjoyed, thinking they would really interest me as standalone novels too! But the rest I just didn’t find interesting. I also thought these stories would be more horror than they were. I hope Augustina will release a new novel at soon, I will definitely give that another try!

Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird is a stunningly diverse collection of 20 tense, shocking and brutal short stories from Agustina Bazterrica.

This was a beautifully crafted collection, it is like every single word was placed to perfection to create such a beautiful and evocative reading experience. Every one of the stories delves deeply into the human psyche, uncovers our darkest fantasies or delves deeply into our most deranged nightmares.
Within moments of starting the first of these stories, I was left in awe of Bazterrica's beautifully haunting and razor-sharp writing. I have never before read something which manages to be both incredibly macabre yet still managing to remain so humourous and relatable.

A wonderfully thrilling collection of horrifically dark and dangerous short stories. This is one not to be slept on!

A beautifully written collection of short stories from the author who brought us Tender is the Flesh. I'm a big fan of TitF and was ecstatic to receive an advanced copy of Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird.

This collection fell a little short of the bar set by Bazterrica's first full length translated novel, but was an enjoyable read nonetheless. She is quickly proving herself an absolute master of existential horror, with haunting, free flowing prose and poetic depictions of perception and the horror we can hold within it. The perfect collection for fans of Eric LaRocca. Thanks to Netgalley for my copy.

Following her Tender is the Flesh, this is another bold offering showcasing Bazterrica's grotesque and macabre imagination, though the stories here are more horror-adjacent than the nauseating pushed-to-the-logical-extremes of Flesh.

With a strong urban vibe and recourse to issues of death, sexuality and gender, these veer between moments of dark, dark humour to the claustrophobic classic scariness of 'The Solitary Ones'.

The tales vary in length and in narrative voice: those articulated through the tones of young girls worked especially well for me. And there's a nice eliding between the dreadfulness of relationships and something more figurative: I'm thinking of the edgy 'Candy Pink' here.

I especially appreciate the unexpectedness of Bazterrica's vision, not just at the narrative level but also in the word choices through which the story is expressed (thanks also to the translator).

So, compulsive and haunting little gems of delicious grotesquery - loved this!

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

As soon as I read the first story in this collection of nineteen short stories, I knew that I was going to absolutely love this. I quickly fell in love with Agustina's writing, I love how she describes things in such a horrific way that it makes it easy to picture the story unfolding in your head. I love how within these short stories, she explores so many different topics and each story is wrapped up beautifully - they are so unhinged and horrifying but I could not stop reading, I devoured this book because I was so intrigued where each story was going to go.

I definitely had a few favourites in this collection, for example 'A Light, Swift and Monstrous Sound', 'Candy Pink', 'Unamuno's Boxes', 'No Tears', 'The Continuous Equality of the Circumference' and 'The Solitary Ones'.

⚠️ TWs: mentions blood, death (human and animal), suicide, alcohol use, paedophilia, murder, grief, profanity, vomitting, poisoning, overdose, gun use, sexual situations, dismemberment, child abuse, assassination, zoophilic and necrophiliac incest, physical assault, colonisation, dieting, choking, prostitution, abortion, whipping, rape and burns ⚠️

This is a short horror story collection that explores strange situations and gave me major Hammer House of Horror vibes. Another review likened these stories to Modern Art and I think that's apt. I could see the skill involved in writing this collection, I can see how well received this has been by others... and much like Modern Art, I don't get it. A couple of the stories - Roberto, No Tears - made me laugh, and some were uncomfortably gory - A Light Swift and Monstrous Sound. But none of them had a huge emotional impact on me besides, "Huh, that's something."

I received this arc for free from netgalley in exchange for a review.

I don’t even have any words. This collection was modern art. I’m not even joking it was incredible. The first story she really didn’t need to go that hard but she did, beginning with an image of a dentist picking up her neighbours dentures and the neighbour throwing themselves out of a window and landing dead in front of her. I loved ‘Unamuno’s Boxes’ about the taxi driver, ‘Roberto’, ‘Dishwasher’, ‘Tiecher vs Nietzsche’, and ‘Elena-Marie Sandoz’.

The two I cannot stop thinking about are ‘Candy Pink’ which might be my favourite of the selection. It was absolutely unhinged. It played with form and narrative in such an engrossing and horrific way and I have never read a story about heartbreak written so violently and candidly before. ‘The Solitary Ones’ which is the final story in the collection is an absolutely masterpiece. The final image of it is going to haunt me forever. What a way to end a short story collection.

Nineteen Claws is everything I wanted. It encapsulates the crux of what is so special and horrifying about Argentine women’s fiction. Her prose is even wittier and visceral than in Tender is the Flesh and she really uses the short story medium to explore a vast scope of horror and horror-adjacent ideas.

Honestly put it in an art gallery. I loved it.