Parading Around Among the Living Like Nothing Happened

Zachary Gillan explores Samanta Schweblin’s “Good and Evil and Other Stories,” translated by Megan McDowell.

By Zachary GillanOctober 22, 2025

• SF

IN THE FIRST STORY in Samanta Schweblin’s remarkable new collection Good and Evil and Other Stories, a woman who should be dead—or, perhaps, is dead but fails to act like it—is accosted by a neighbor for her dishonest choice to “parade around among the living like nothing happened.” One might take this as a précis of Schweblin’s writing; her stories might not partake of the common tropes and tactics of the horror genre, but she is nonetheless out to terrify and unsettle her readers. Schweblin is a modern master of uncanny fiction, and she subtly, dreadfully parades around among the literary in these six stories of hauntings, living deaths, and gothic horror. The book, excellently translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, is full of glimpses of terror and glancing surreality, artfully using the techniques of genre fiction to ratchet up tension in the service of stories with a human core of sadness and guilt.

Schweblin is one of the great current writers of “art-dread,” a term introduced by Noël Carroll in his 1990 book The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart to refer to stories that center not disgust (which he argues lies at the heart of horror) but “a psychologically disturbing event of preternatural origins” that “causes a sense of unease and awe, perhaps of momentary anxiety and foreboding.” This last effect is where Schweblin shines, her exceptional sense of mood and affect established through foreshadowing and narrative manipulations of the passage of time. Dread, after all, is anticipatory, separate from the immediate disgust and revulsion of horror, a more generalized worry and anxiety. Schweblin’s short novel Fever Dream (2014) is, for my money, one of the great works of art-dread, and this new collection, her third, follows artfully in its footsteps.

In “Welcome to the Club,” the aforementioned opener, the art-dread of momentary anxiety and foreboding finds its expression in stasis, time without change. It begins with a woman jumping into a pond, weighed down with rocks, and staying there for three minutes, five, longer, waiting to drown. “I was sure this would happen faster,” she reflects, as nothing seems to change, giving way to the dreadful question “What if this is it? To float and wonder for the rest of eternity […] To be unable to move forward or backward, ever again, in any direction.” Eventually, she realizes that she has drowned, but this has changed nothing, and she goes home to her husband and two daughters and their daily demands of her. Her conversations with the neighbor, a similarly liminal being, revolve around his gothic insistence that she has to pay a price—to bargain with the weight of her attempted escape through her actions in the present. This contrasts with the woman’s sense of stasis, with the question of what a return to “normalcy” might mean after the seemingly successful self-annihilation, when normalcy itself was a form of stasis; the protagonist, recurrently, stands frozen, tendons locked, much as the children’s class rabbit, temporarily homed with the family, freezes in the face of danger.

“Welcome to the Club” uses that rabbit as a locus of art-dread. “A Fabulous Animal” and “William in the Window” similarly fix animals at the center of their dreadful uncanny (as did Fever Dream with a dying horse). In opposition to the stasis at the heart of “Welcome to the Club,” these tales emphasize travel, displacement, the dépaysement of leaving home. “William in the Window” centers on an Argentinean author at a residency in Shanghai. Her husband is ill, and she left home, in part, to avoid her dread of loss, the “wait in horror for the moment when [she] would find him dead.” At the residency, she spends time with a Scottish woman who is similarly dreading the death of her beloved cat back home, and the two share the insistent refrain that things are “all right” in contrast to their dread. Schweblin’s concern with time is foregrounded when the narrator mentions, offhandedly, that “that was the last time [they] spoke before the thing [she] want[s] to talk about happened.”

The dread that suffuses Schweblin’s stories is often caught up in their very construction; the foreshadowing lies in the fact that this is a reconstructed story, the remembrance of a dread occurrence one still finds the need to talk about. In “A Fabulous Animal,” a dying mother calls an old friend 20 years after her son’s fatal accident, attempting to reconstruct the story of what happened that night. Schweblin’s is an oeuvre that builds on itself by returning to particularly effective images and a thematic focus on parents and children. Good and Evil and Other Stories might not break new ground for her, but it doesn’t need to. On a macro level, we might even think of her thematic concern with the weight of the past as operating metafictionally between her old work and new. “A Fabulous Animal,” in particular, shares much of its DNA with Fever Dream.

These thematic concerns also anchor “An Eye in the Throat,” not just my favorite in this collection but a new favorite story in general (and I read a lot of short stories). In the 1990s, a child, under the supervision of his father, swallows a battery, and the story traces out the aftermath of his hospitalization, surgeries, and loss of voice. One night, on a lengthy drive back from a hospital visit, the parents realize that the child isn’t in the car with them, and the father is then haunted by mysterious late-night calls every night for decades. Schweblin plays with the construction of the narrative in a particularly fascinating interlude that finds the narrative voice dissolving, the child haunting his parents even while he is corporeally elsewhere: “And me? From where am I looking at them? Whatever has happened to me, it has turned me into something else.” He’s not a literal ghost—they find him, unharmed, and he narrates the story looking back as an adult—but in Carroll’s “momentary anxiety and foreboding,” he functions as one anyway, haunting his parents and the narrative, in a liminal state not unlike that of the mother in “Welcome to the Club.” It’s a masterful interlude: narratively and affectively fascinating while simultaneously throwing the reader off-balance and capturing the dreadful panic of the parents as they realize their son is missing. This temporary displacement is key to the overall haunting of the story, tied to the father’s guilt over the accident, as the boy wonders about his tracheotomy scar and the emotional displacement it has created between him and his father: “[I]f I stick a finger in the hole that is mine but that hurts in the body of another, if I probe it, if I prod it, what I touch in there—is that my father?”

As the uneasy, foreboding calls start to haunt him, the father comes to anticipate them, to lift up the receiver “before the bell even trembles,” to find an unexpected sense of calm in the nightly occurrences as “whatever it is that comes through that receiver begins to seem ever more familiar. He no longer hangs up but waits to be hung up on.” The uncanny, in other words, which lies in the intermingling of the familiar and the strange, here comes to lose the strangeness and emphasizes, through repetition and stasis, familiarity, without losing its preternatural character.

“The Woman from Atlántida” also tracks dread throughout its narrator’s life as unsettlement and familiarity intertwine. The story opens with a hairdresser taking care of an unkempt, asocial woman for free, mentioning only that the woman had been there “when the thing with [the narrator’s] sister happened,” before the narrative plunges back in time. Escaping the tedium of a preteen family beach vacation, the narrator’s sister announces to a stranger that the two of them are sneaking into other people’s homes in the middle of the night. The narrator notes that her “sister’s exaggeration was always a preview of what was to come,” creating both dreadful anticipation and a reminder, again, of the active agency of storytelling. Making the fib come true, the sisters repeatedly break into the house of a local woman they were told was a suicidal poet, tidying her chaotic home and attempting to inspire her to write (in as uncanny and dreadful a manner as they can). The sisters become the woman’s muses but are, in another sense, haunting her, even as the woman is haunted by the idea of being a poet. (Is she one, or, rather, was she? Or are they forcing her to become one?) Pitys (a name shared, tellingly, with a nymph pursued by the great god Pan), the maybe-poet, the eventually unkempt woman, is spectral from the beginning, as the girls search for her in “sheets tangled up in clothes and pillows [that] made it hard to tell whether there was anyone in the bed or not.” The surreal dread of their haunting is caught up with truly affecting scenes of the narrator adoring her older sister, who drives their pursuit of the poet.

The story incorporates this haunting-without-a-ghost alongside a doubling-without-a-doppelgänger (that other uncanny mainstay). As the narrator watches the poet and her sister out in the nighttime ocean, she observes, “The two of them seemed the same size, and although I knew it was because the woman was farther away, the resemblance took me aback. I pretended not to know which was which, and I understood how much I loved them both.” The point Schweblin emphasizes, again, is the constructed narrativity of the dread—here an almost ecstatic, willful confusion—but also the comfort found in the shared misery of the encounter between the grown narrator and aged Pitys, as the former cleanses the shells and sand haunting the latter’s matted hair.

The collection’s closer, “A Visit from the Chief,” also focuses on a home invasion and shares Schweblin’s ability to pack quietly devastating biographies into short bursts that inform rather than contain the narrative. At the end of “Atlántida,” we chart the protagonist’s journey after that momentous beach trip in the space of a single paragraph; similarly, “A Visit from the Chief” opens with its own protagonist’s life leading up to the preternatural invasion of her own home. Early on, the protagonist is given a devastating brief biography: “Lidia had gotten married and divorced and in between she’d had a daughter, who had used her very first paycheck to leave Buenos Aires and move to another continent,” never to return. The absence of the daughter is another haunting. Lidia, alone, moves into a smaller apartment but recreates her daughter’s room there, keeping everything set up exactly the same. She works at her daughter’s desk so that, if she “ever did come home, Lidia would be able to put it all back in the two minutes the elevator would take to reach the fourth floor. She liked to think that every day her daughter once again lent her that corner of the house, the only one where she seemed capable of concentrating.” It becomes the story of an exorcism of sorts, an unlikely series of events leading to a man insisting that because he’s robbing her, he owes her a favor.

This sense of a deal, combined with a wondering about the difference between being alive and dead, of “what this whole business of living a life was even for,” again echoes “Welcome to the Club”: the tales offer opposing approaches to stasis and freedom. These echoes give the book as a whole a recursive feeling, a small example of the large-scale effect of Schweblin’s oeuvre, but the woman in “A Visit from the Chief” does more to escape her sense of stillness than does the woman in “Welcome to the Club.” The effect is that of a dual path unfolding for the reader: a way out as well as a way back to the preternatural, psychologically disturbing beginning, to the preternatural, psychologically disturbing art-dread of Schweblin’s exceptional works.