Each of these stories is equal parts Hitchcock film and razor blade: austere, immaculately crafted, profoundly unsettling, and capable of cutting you. Amparo Dávila is Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortazár by way of Somers, and I’m so grateful she’s in translation.
— Carmen Maria Machado
A sensationally creepy new selection of stories from the author of the cult phenomenon The Houseguest
Written in sharp, impressionistic prose steeped in horror, Amparo Dávila’s stories are tiny nightmares come to life. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who shows, sometimes in just a few pages, that the narrow line between sanity and madness is even finer than it had seemed at first glance, and that anyone could be one false move away from their doom. Gothic, dark, surrealist, atmospheric, this newly translated selection from the author of the global sensation The Houseguest “casts a delightful and disconcerting spell” (Los Angeles Times).
Each of these stories is equal parts Hitchcock film and razor blade: austere, immaculately crafted, profoundly unsettling, and capable of cutting you. Amparo Dávila is Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortazár by way of Somers, and I’m so grateful she’s in translation.
— Carmen Maria Machado
Like Poe for the new millennium.
— Kirkus Reviews
Mexico’s answer to Shirley Jackson. Dávila radiates an interesting sense of unease and calamity. Over and over again characters find themselves in danger, or in thrall to a horror that is not described, only hinted at. For a very long time, women have sought comfort in the darkness when their own lives were full of quiet despair. It is this silent scream which permeates Dávila stories.
