Review: "The Houseguest: And Other Stories" by Amparo Dávila

Quick Summary

Type: Short story collection

Genre: Fiction, horror

Description: "The first collection in English of an endlessly surprising, master storyteller. Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila's stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted - you'll finish each one gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures."

Read Time: 4 days

Rating: 3.5 stars

Review

After reading the first two stories, Moses and Gaspar and The Houseguest, I am so far convinced of one thing: the author has a debilitating fear of cats. When she describes the creatures that terrorize her characters, all I can see are evil cats.

With that being said, while I don't necessarily feel terror, I do certainly feel a deep, unsettling discomfort as the characters terrorized by the cat-demons slowly lose control of their lives.

The following stories put to rest the idea of evil cats, but they were still entertaining. A few were certainly more confusing than others, but overall enjoyable.

I'm not sure I fully felt the horror in the stories, so that certainly disappointed me. The stories that were most chilling, in my opinion, were those that didn't rely on monsters (like the toad or the not-cats) but rather on human emotion and fear. I especially liked the story of the woman recounting her 'dream' of murdering a friend, the story of the date, and the final story of the man planning his funeral.

What I really enjoyed was the scene setting. In each story, the author quickly painted a vivid image of both the character(s) and the setting.

It was a fun read, even if the horror wasn't quite there for me.