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.