An undercurrent of tension runs throughout this selection of short stories, which left me with a deep feeling of unease. Short story collections are always a bit hit or miss for me, and this one was no different; I think my favourite story of the collection was "Welcome to the Club", and unfortunately none of the other stories reached those heady heights!

Schweblin is an amazing writer but I miss the deep horror elements of her work in this latest collection. I liked one of the stories which had a ghostly feel to it but the rest of the stories didn’t feel like they pushed the boat out or did anything new, which was quite disappointing. I would love to see her write more horror into her stories again or write a new literary horror novel as that for me is where she excels.

Fascinating and sometimes disturbing collection of short stories. Lots of unanswered questions and open endings.

I just finished Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin (thanks to the publisher for the proof copy!), and while it’s not my favourite of hers, it still had that classic Schweblin magic. Her writing has this way of flowing so effortlessly—like the words just slip off the page and start playing out as little films in your head.

This collection had some hits and a couple that didn’t quite land for me, which is why I’d give it a 3-star rating overall. But when Schweblin does hit the mark, she really hits it. My favourite from the bunch was The Woman from Atlantida—so strange, so eerie, and exactly the kind of unsettling I expect (and love) from her.

If you’re already a fan of Schweblin, it’s definitely worth a read for that immersive style she does so well. Just maybe not the place I’d recommend starting if you’re new to her work.

A collection of horror stories that focus on the horrors of daily family life. Featured are tales that put a twist on the everyday. As with many collections there were some I liked more than others. One or two are stuck in my head.

I was really looking forward to this collection of short stories, having previously read and enjoyed Fever Dream and Little Eyes. I love the way Samanta Schweblin builds tension in her writing - an unsettling atmosphere that feels rooted in the everyday, which makes it all the more disturbing. While that familiar unease was present in a few stories - Welcome to the Club being a standout - it felt lacking in many others.

The collection often leaned heavily on obviously disturbing subject matter, such as animal death and child peril, to create a sense of horror. For me, this approach felt somewhat forced and less effective than the subtle, psychological dread Schweblin usually excels at. Many of the premises didn't quite hook me, and while it’s common with short stories to be left wanting more, I often felt the narratives were incomplete.

Overall, I missed the quiet, creeping strangeness of Schweblin’s earlier work.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the opportunity to read this.

I enjoyed most of these stories, but they all felt like they were missing something and I can’t quite put my finger on what. The commentary on daily life gave way to a slightly creepy feeling, but I wanted there to be more, more horror elements and more focus on the uncertainty of life I think.

This was my first time reading anything by Samanta Schweblin and whilst she wasn’t previously on my radar, I read some reviews for this work and her other works before starting ‘Good and Evil and Other Stories’ and I was looking forward to reading this. I am a massive fan on uncanny, weird fiction and thought this would be perfect for me but I was left strangely disappointed after finishing the collection.

The collection starts with, for me, the two weakest stories- ‘Welcome to the Club’ and ‘A Fabulous Animal’. Whilst the stories are extremely well written and have interesting premises, they didn’t lean enough into the ‘weird’ for me and I found them a tad boring. Things got better with ‘William in the Willow’ and ‘An Eye in the Throat’. ‘William in the Willow’ definitely teetered on the supernatural side, with lots of mystery and intrigue to keep me hooked. ‘An Eye in the Throat’ was more grounded in reality, but was written from such a unique perspective that it still had a thrill to it. ‘The Woman from Atlántida’ was the definite highlight of the collection for me, this perfectly balanced the strange with the mundane and I didn’t want this story to end.

Whilst the collection did get better as I progressed, the last story ‘A Visit from the Chief’ soured the experience for me. This story felt far too violent compared to the rest of the stories, it felt too real and uncomfortable- yes it evoked emotion from me and I can’t argue that that’s what good writing should do but it didn’t fit well with a collection of stories that had more whimsical, fantastical tones.

Overall, I can see why Schweblin receives the praise she does- from a technical standpoint her writing is beautiful and the stories are crafted excellently- but for me the stories didn’t lean far enough into the weirdness as I would have liked.

Thank you to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the chance to review this ARC. This review can be viewed on my Goodreads page at the following link: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/177713825-megan-carr

"I am rational and mature enough to understand that this cannot be happening." She spoke precisely, seriously. "But if I'm gonig crazy, I need someone to stay with me."

Good and Evil and Other Stories is Megan McDowell's translation of El buen mal by Samanta Schweblin, collection of six short stories. This is the fifth collaboration between the pair after the brilliant Fever Dream (shortlisted for the 2017 International Booker), story collection Mouthful of Birds (longlisted for the 2019 International Booker), the sci-fi novel Little Eyes (longlisted for the 2020 International Booker) and most recently a second collection Seven Empty Houses (winner of the 2022 National Book Award for translated literature).

It's striking, given typical delays in translation into English, that this is appearing close to the original Spanish-language publication in March 2025 (the Dutch version seemingly actually appearing earlier), perhaps a testament to the success of Schweblin's work and indeed McDowell's translation.

For me Schweblin is at her best - Fever Dream the exemplar - when the work is pitche in what the literary critic Tzvetan Todorov calls in his The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre "the fantastic" - indeed I think I may have come across the term when reaching for an exploration of what Fever Dream did so well. Todorov argues that an author can choose between a rational explanation for supernatural events - what Todorov calls "the uncanny" - and a supernatural explanation - what he calls the "marvellous" (and most would call fantasy). Todorov focuses on the difficult to occupy middle ground:

"The fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty. Once we choose one answer or the other, we leave the fantastic for a neighbouring genre, the uncanny or the marvellous. The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.
...
The fantastic requires the fulfillment of three conditions. First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural or supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader's role is so to speak entrusted to a character, and at the same time the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work - in the case of naive reading, the actual reader identifies himself with the character. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as "poetic" interpretations."

Mouthful of Birds occupied similar territory, but with the emphasis a little less on supernatural elements, and more on strange situations and behaviour, and Seven Empty Houses did away with anything supernatural at all, but uncanny behaviour was one common thread.

This collection, which comes with the epigraph "Strange is Always Truer" from Silvina Ocampo, feels closer to a Mouthful of Birds.

The story "William in the Window", a cat-ghost story involving two authors on a residency in China, each with worries as to the domestic situation they've left behind, comes with the intriguing comment in the author's afterword that the story 'did happen. It is perhaps the most autobiographical story I've written, and perhaps also, for that reason, it's better not to say any more.'

The opening story, Welcome to the Club, is narrated by a woman who tries to drown herself, but to her surprise seems to survive under water. When she returns to her husband and girls, she is unclear if she is still alive, or something other, and the story's title comes from a neighbour who has experienced a similar fate, and tells her that to remain in this word you have to cause pain for your loved ones every day: That will fill you with guilt, and if the guilt is strong enough, you'll need to stay to take care of them ... Do you want to stay on this side of the world? You want to save them from the damage of losing their mother. Which bodes ill for the class pet rabbit the girls have brought home for the week...

An Eye in the Throat is narrated by a boy who when two years old swallows a lithium battery and ends up surviving but with a permanent tracheostomy to breath, and the permanent loss of his voice. His father though is fixated on (or perhaps transfer his guilt to) an event that occured 6 months later, when, on a long drive back from another hospital appointment, they stop at a YPF service station. The father has a hostile encounter with the service station owner, a man named Morris, and, perhaps distracted, he and his wife fail to notice the boy has left the car, and drive off without him (thinking he is asleep under a blanket in the back seat). They drive for an hour before realising and when they return Morris has found the boy and return him to them. But from that day on, the boy loses his vitality, and the father is plagued with silent phone calls on his landline, which he is convinced come from Morris. Twenty years later he returns to the garage to confront Morris, only for the latter to put a different complexion on the silent calls.

The Woman from Atlántida was perhaps my favourite story. The story is told years later by a woman, now a hairdresser in Atlántida, a childhood holiday resort and scene of a family tragedy. She provides free haircuts to an elderly alcoholic woman, 'Pitys', a poet by background if no longer practice. She remembers, although seemingly Pitys doesn't, a key incident from her childhood that involved her, Pitys and her sister:

"I wondered if she had recognised me, if she knew who I was and if that's why she came. Every once in a while I caught her looking at me. and I'd wait to see if one of us would venture to say something. I'd first met her almost forty years ago, during a three-week summer vacation. I was ten years old, and my sister was thirteen. I didn't see her again after that, and no one ever knew that Pitys was with us when the thing with my sister happened.

And then one day, a whole lifetime later, Pitys stopped in front of the window of this salon and stood staring inside until I went out to get here. When I asked what we could do for her she opened her mouth, but not a word came out. She studied my face for a few seconds, and finally looked down at her fingernails. It seemed as if she had discovered something new and soul-stirring in them, and I thought about the ceiling fan in her room, the photograph that she carried in the pocket of her robe, and the man who had told us about her that first time."

And the story she recounts, one of two precocious young girls presenting themselves as 'inspiration' to an alcoholic poet suffering from writer's block, and whose home they snuck into, is a complex one, more conventional than uncanny, but both moving and tragic.

Mundanity on a razor's edge, Samantha Schweblin knows what's she's doing and does it bloody well.

The common thread between all these stories is the lingering tension. It runs throughout every story, and the brief moments where it seems absent still don't feel peaceful either, but rather leave us suffocating with the anticipation of its return. This collection is like the atmosphere right before a summer storm, I was always on the edge of my seat, waiting for the worse to happen and never knowing where or how it was gonna hit. The first person narration played extremely well into that, limiting our perception to a single character's senses and understanding. It influenced the pace as well, as if the character was trying to push back something awful, by moving through the plot agonisingly slowly. This only froze the settings, emptied them, and trapped the characters, making them all the more vulnerable and powerless.
The distant memories quality of things operates in a very similar maner. Most of the stories are recollection of old events and the way they're told plagues them with a fascinating fatality, hard to pinpoint but evident from the start. Early on, we know the people we meet are doomed, always through seedy but somehow mundane turn of events. This makes it all the more hypnotising, almost voyeuristically. Although the details of their lives are common, realistic, there's a heavy and uncomfortable aura to everything describe or omitted that forces you to keep reading and keep witnessing.
Loved it.

Welcome to the club - 3,5+
A Fabulous Animal - 3,5
William in the Window - 3,75
An eye in the throat - 4,5
The woman from Atlántida - 4,75/5
A visit from the Chief - 3,5

4-/5

A new Samanta Schweblin book is always a must read even though I didn’t necessarily love her last two books translated into English. This collection contains six stories and as much as I was mesmerised by Schweblin’s writing / Megan McDowell’s translation, it was just ok. Similar to Seven Empty Houses, the stories started off well, I was hooked by each and every one, but halfway through they fizzled out and I was left unimpressed. An Eye in the Throat and A Visit from the Chief were particularly gripping and tense. Still, I’ll keep reading Schweblin’s writing and whatever she writes or is translated next!

I thought this book was a quick, fast read and that the stories worked well as short stories and in a good order. I enjoyed most of the stories but a couple fell flat for me. They all have a literary feel with a hint of horror element to them which I did really like. I flew through this one and still do recommend to read but read maybe one a day and not one after the other.

As is the case with most short story collections, there are some I liked more than others, but on the whole I quite enjoyed this collection! The writing was very fluid, almost like water, which is even more impressive seeing as this is a translated work. 4 stars

3.5 stars

I keep trying with Schweblin but something about her writing never quite lands for me in the way that Mariana Enríquez and Agustina Bazterrica, for example, do.

The six stories here are all in her trademark 'everyday uncanny' mode and I appreciate the way she finds the weird and uneasy in mundane life, especially in family relationships. There are no Gothic trappings, no obvious hauntings or identifiable monsters here.

The best stories for me are 'A Fabulous Animal' and 'An Eye in the Throat' both of which take family trauma and give it an emotive, visceral twist. But some of the other tales left me unmoved. There are some great ideas such as 'Welcome to the Club' which starts with a woman trying to drown herself, like Virginia Woolf, with stones in her pockets, but that beginning didn't quite come to fruition.

I like what these stories are doing in extending the boundaries of the weird as a literary category but I found the effect uneven. Still, the good stories are very good with a powerful elliptical quality that haunts.

Many thanks to Picador for an ARC via Netgalley.

This story collection is exactly what you would expect if you’re familiar with Schweblin’s work. Each of these stories, like the title implies have a fairytale like quality, teetering between realism and magical realism and questioning existence and interactions. Each story feels intentional and crafted intentionally to be set alongside each other. Whilst not every story personally I thought was perfect, the vast majority of this collection transports you into a strange world so similar to our own, exploring and dissecting the real, the supernatural, and the strange.

Argentine author Samanta Schweblin is part of a new wave of Latin American weird, speculative and horror fiction, alongside other authors (including several female and/or queer writers) such as Mariana Enríquez, Agustina Bazterrica, Mónica Ojeda, Giovanna Rivera and Bernardo Esquinca. However, while it is convenient to group authors into one geographical school, this often comes at the cost of losing sight of the idiosyncrasies of the individual authors.

In Schweblin’s case, what strikes me is her ability to create a sinister atmosphere of dread and unease, while barely relying – if at all – on traditional horror or Gothic tropes. Her previous collection to be published in English – Seven Empty Houses – did refashion, in its own way, the trope of the haunted or abandoned house. However, her latest – Good and Evil and Other Stories – avoids altogether traditional monsters, ghouls, and scary settings, and, instead, injects the uncanny into the everyday. In the opening tale, for instance, a young mother tries to kill herself by diving to the bottom of a lake, but then resurfaces to go back to her family, only to feel as if she left a part of herself in the deep waters. In another, a man regularly receives taunting silent prank calls at night, which may be somehow related to his son, with whom he has an awkward relationship blighted by a terrible accident. Elsewhere, two sisters befriend an alcoholic poet at a seaside resort, but their nightly escapades end in tragedy. All six tales in this collection inhabit ‘fever dream’ territory, punctuated with inexplicable happenings, peopled by unnerving characters who flit in and out of the narrative. Ordinary relationships and events are made strange. Family and friends become the backdrop for the horrific. Uncanny elements are often a metaphor for very real and human issues.

The collection is masterfully translated from the original Spanish by the prolific Megan McDowell, responsible for bringing into English earlier works by Schweblin and several other Latin American authors. She authentically conveys the haunted poetry of these magical tales.

https://endsoftheword.blogspot.com/2025/04/Good-and-Evil-Samanta-Schweblin.html

Fantastical, uncanny, weird. All good, to me. A small but beautifully formed collection of strange stories. It's difficult writing this type of story without wandering off into the genre of fantasy or leaning too hard against fairy tale or myths, but Schweblin pitches it right. More would have been good. My grateful thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC.

In Good and Evil and Other Stories, Samanta Schweblin once again proves herself a master of unsettling fiction. This forthcoming collection distills the eerie brilliance of her style into six taut, dreamlike tales that linger just beyond the edge of reason. Blending the surreal with the deeply human, Schweblin explores guilt, grief, and the fragile architecture of familial bonds. With her signature precision and quiet dread, each story pulses with emotional tension, revealing moments of everyday life cracked open by the uncanny. It’s a haunting, elegant addition to Schweblin’s already remarkable body of work.