As a Samanta Schweblin superfan, I couldn't wait for this collection and it didn't disappoint. Each story is like a little gem - perfectly paced, expertly crafted. Her way with words is so unique, and I will read absolutely anything she writes.

ha, what a fantabulous good read. and i mean how do you be such an author that you manage to get such tight stories within all of these titles!? wow. i felt a whole lot whilst reading these stories. they were all so different but somehow and brilliantly they carried the same writing that Samantha brought to each story. i had her character, her flow, her style and thats only a good thing.
the books were strange but not. they made me feel weird but didn't. they make sense and no sense at all. i felt hopeful and distressed. i feel sad but not. it was just so good! you get totally involved in the story and dont even know if you can pin point why. and they make you think. and before long they are finished and you are turning pages quickly for the next all the while still feeling tense from the last one.
i was left thinking long after each but still wanted to quickly read the next. so at time i was in a bit of a tizz lol. and most of the time what i felt i couldn't quite decipher and so just ended up knowing Samantha is brilliant and way too clever for me.
some of the titles like welcome to the community needed me to really stop as i enjoyed that ones. and a few others i think i could go back to and see something totally new. and im not one for going back and reading again often so that tells you something.
also the Eye in the Throat was just sad. but compelling and brilliant too. that story left me to pause for a while.
there is an eerie edge to the writing and sometimes slightly uneasy it leave me feeling. but all the time im simply moving myself to read more.
a great read this book. one of my faves to date of short stories.

Thank you to NetGalley and Publishers for this ARC

This has Schweblin written all over it.

A wonderful collection of fascinating and disturbing short stories, that holds underlying tension.

I felt that this was incredibly similar to Mouthful of Birds. Although they both share similar territory, this novel contains strange situations and behaviour. The epigraph "Strange is Always Truer" works for both titles if not a little closer to Mouthful of Birds.

A few annoyances with this novel is that there was quite a lot of unanswered questions, and I felt that some stories were missing elements that would of made the stories feel more cohesive.

Having loved Little Eyes, I was thrilled to receive an ARC of Good and Evil and Other Stories through NetGalley.

Schweblin is still a master of the uncanny, and this latest collection of stories only confirms that. Her short stories crawl under your skin in the best (and worst) possible way. “William in the Window” in particular evokes the eerie, psychological unease of Edgar Allan Poe. There’s a creeping dread in the everyday that Schweblin captures so effortlessly.

Her work here often reminded me of fellow Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez — both have a gift for exposing the horror that simmers just beneath the surface of daily life. In stories like “Welcome to the Club,” the message is clear: reality itself is the true horror.

The characters often feel lost, unmoored by grief, misfortune, or inexplicable events — like the father whose child swallows a battery.

These are haunting little gems — dark, precise, and unsettling. Highly recommended for fans of literary horror that blurs the line between the real and the surreal.

I should start by saying that as a reviewer, I feel like I'm not easy to impress and I am not given to hyperbole. Having said that this collection of short stories absolutely floored me. I was privileged enough to receive an ARC of this collection from Netgalley. I read a lot of short stories (it's something I'm doing intentionally with the goal to read the equivalent of one a day for the year) and this collection broke me.

There are only 6 stories in the collection and they're all unique and emotive in their own rights. There was more than one story here that brought me to the verge of tears. In Schweblin's world, the strange and the sad and the supernatural elbow each other for space.

The opening story, Welcome to the Club, is about a suicide attempt (a drowning) that is not completed. The female protagonist returns to her home in drenched clothing, reeking of the sea, only for her to reveal that she's married with a family and must continue with her day as if she hasn't just had a near brush with death. Of course, not everyone is oblivious to the life-shattering event she's narrowly avoided, and there's a price to be paid for it.

A Fabulous Animal starts with a call: Elena, a dying woman, wants to catch up with her old friend. A simple enough premise, but in Schweblin's hands this story is just one long turn of the knife into the reader's heart.

An Eye in the Throat is the story I found most affecting, showing us a father-son relationship that's never quite been the same since one fateful day, and a father whose landline still rings in the dead of night with troubling calls from a silent caller.

In The Woman From Atlantida, a hairdresser cuts an alcoholic's hair without fee or explanation and we gradually learn the truth about how they first met.

And A Visit From The Chief starts off innocently enough, with Lidia leaving her elderly mother's medical institute. On the subway home, she's asked for change by a woman she recognises as a runaway from the same medical unit. Like all of the stories in this collection, it was impossible to predict where this story would go next.

It feels unfair to single any story out here because they're all such fully-formed and unmissable pieces of short fiction. The characters and scenarios here will stay with you a long time after you put the book down.

Highly recommended for readers of horror and literary fiction and a strong contender for my book of the year.

‘’Madness scares you, it distracts you, but you have to look at it closely.’’

I have read Samanta Schweblin’s work extensively, and each time, I’m struck anew by the power of her writing. In just ten to twenty pages, she constructs riddles—quiet, contained, yet charged with emotional and psychological weight—that can spark hours of discussion. She transforms the mundane into the disturbing, turning everyday encounters into moments of quiet terror. If Fernanda Melchor tests the limits of your sanity with supernatural dread bleeding into reality, Schweblin does the opposite: she takes familiar relationships and recognisable emotions and quietly corrupts them. She invites you to reconsider what it means to age, to belong, to parent, to survive in a world where madness spreads silently, like an infection you didn’t know you were carrying.

The new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, published in 2025, continues her exploration of psychological fragility with chilling precision. The stories are brief but relentless. They don’t rely on overt horror or shock—they work like whispers at the edge of your mind, asking unsettling questions in deceptively ordinary settings.

‘’Mommy, are you happy?’’

Welcome to the Club: The story opens with a woman’s failed suicide attempt. What becomes immediately clear is that she is deeply depressed—but why? What has driven her to make a decision that would leave her two daughters without a mother? And who is the strange neighbour, the Hunter, who seems to know everything about her?
A story that raises a million questions and deliberately leaves the answers to the reader.
A Fabulous Animal: Two old friends talk on the phone. One of them is always on the run. The other is dying. After so many years, the only thing that unites them is the death of a boy and a horse…

William in the Window: In a writer’s retreat, two women become friends, sharing their worries about the ones they have left at home. One is afraid her husband will die without her. The other is afraid for her cat and gives little thought to her husband. How do you accept that kind of distance when your own partner is dying of cancer? And what does it mean when a dead animal appears to be watching you?
A quiet tale about the companionship of marriage—or the absence of it—and the human need to cling to whatever anchor life offers

‘’But at night, if the phone rings and my father picks up, no one answers.’’

An Eye in the Throat: Narrated by a precociously bright two-year-old, this is the story of a single moment that leads to the collapse of a family. As is often the case in Schweblin’s fiction, every page holds layers of secrets, instincts, confessions, and quiet mysteries.
One of the saddest stories I’ve ever read—deeply memorable and quietly haunting. A poignant study of a fractured bond between father and son.


‘’And you two?’’, he asked. ‘’What do you do to keep from getting bored?’’
My sister said, ‘’We sneak into other people’s houses.’’

The Woman from Atlantida: The visit of a client takes the narrator back to a summer of her childhood when she and her sister encountered mysterious characters such as a woman poet who seems to be coming from a different time. The story of an unsettling summer, of sisterhood, loneliness and addictions, of the kindness of children, the isolation that comes with age, and the moments of disaster that always find us unaware.

A Visit from the Chief: Unfortunately, this story fell flat for me and made little sense. It follows a troubled 60-year-old woman who can’t seem to decide whether she loves her daughter or resents her, while her mother and another elderly woman engage in bizarre antics at a hospice. Add a repulsive male character to the mix, and you’re left with a disappointing, disjointed narrative.
A weak and confusing ending to an otherwise haunting and incisive collection.
Despite its uneven conclusion, Good and Evil and Other Stories confirms once again Samanta Schweblin’s mastery of the short story form. Her writing is precise, eerie, and emotionally complex—never offering easy answers, but always provoking thought. These stories linger long after the last page, unsettling in the best possible way. For readers drawn to quiet horror, psychological unease, and the emotional fissures of ordinary life, this collection is well worth reading.
‘’Why don’t you talk to me?’’, asked the woman. ‘’Why don’t you ask me things?’’
Many thanks to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/

These are the deepest, saddest, heartbreaking, raw and gorgeous stories I’ve read from this author. This is the author's best collection so far. I've read all of her translated works and here her talent, writing style and ability to paint true human tragedies, shine the most. The way she writes children and child perspectives is sublime.
The first story was the only one I disliked, but everything after that was devastatingly beautiful and full of trauma. I cried multiple times.
All of these stories are heavy handed and I could only read one to two a day. I love how each story is like a mini lifetime and I suggest you read them slowly and deliberately just so that you could spend more time with the characters.
My individual ratings are:
Welcome to the club - 2/5 when a neighbor gives you "good" advice, I unfortunately disliked that story
A fabulous animal - 4/5 there was something very special about this story, the ending was not satisfying though
William in the window - 5/5 I related so much with hat story, it instantly became one of my all-time favorite stories
An eye in the throat - 5/5 heartbreaking, I'm shattered
The woman from Atlántida - 5/5 phenomenal story
The visit from the Chief - 3/5 I didn’t get it, but I would re-read it for sure
Thank you to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan | Picador for providing me with the ARC.

Reviewing for issue 107 of Mslexia magazines - "What's New in Short Stories" column. Thank you for the arc!

I received this short story collection as an ARC from NetGalley.

I have just finished the last story in the collection and at first I wasn't sure what to make of it. The stories are good but they just seem to end. Is that to make the reader think about what they have just read and make their own assumptions on what happens next.

I don't read many short story collections so find it harder to review as some of the stories were better than others, whereas as a novel you are rating the whole thing.

I think I would recommend this to people but with the caveat that it makes you think and draw your own conclusions.

Fascinating collection of short stories, I think An Eye in the Throat was my favourite. That was the one that really stood out. Schweblin's notes on the text were really intriguing as well!

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