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*spoilers*

Good and Evil and Other Stories is Samanta Schweblin’s fifth book in English, after Fever Dream (2017), Mouthful of Birds (2019), Little Eyes (2020), and Seven Empty Houses (2022), all translated by Megan McDowell. Schweblin’s signature style provokes a sense of dread and disorientation in the reader, with characters who find it difficult to trust reality or their own senses, wandering through a (figuratively) dark landscape where people form uncertain or unexpected relationships that don’t end well. Ranging from novels about voyeuristic technology and destructive pesticides to collections with stories about dysfunctional families and loneliness, Schweblin’s oeuvre offers Anglophone readers an enlightening glimpse into the world of Spanish-language SFT.

Usually, collections take their titles from one of the included stories, but Good and Evil includes no such story, thus deliberately prompting the reader to think about this dichotomy while reading the six haunting Schweblinesque tales. Of course, none of these stories is a straightforward meditation on good and evil. Rather, they invite us to think about our own understanding of those words and ask if we would then apply those terms to the characters in the stories. “Welcome to the Club” is an unnerving piece about a woman who tries to drown herself, but realizes that it’s not working, comes back up to the surface, and resumes her daily life (taking care of her husband and two daughters), but with a sense of desperation. Apparently, her neighbor, a single man who erected a barricade around his house, witnessed her attempt and implies that he, too, found himself unable to commit suicide. His advice to her moving forward? Calm down and then find ways to provoke pain in someone you love, presumably to start feeling something again. The nameless narrator then decides to kill her daughters’ pet rabbit, but just as she is about to do it, she hesitates, and as the rabbit escapes, she feels a sense of freedom.

Like “Welcome to the Club” (the first story in the collection), the last (“A Visit from the Chief”) features a woman desperately trying to convince herself that her life is fine. Meanwhile, she misses her daughter and finds her work meaningless. When a woman from the same senior home her mother lives in wanders out of the building and onto a train, the narrator feels obligated to take her to her apartment until the old woman can be picked up and taken home. What follows is shocking and yet also invigorating to the narrator–the woman’s son comes to the apartment, trashes it, threatens the narrator with a gun, but says that what he does is help people. He demands that the narrator tell him how he can help her, and eventually she puts into words the pain that she has felt over her nonexistent relationship with her daughter.

Both “A Fabulous Animal” and “The Woman from Atlantida” feature women filled with regret over tragic incidents that happened decades before. In the former, Leila receives a call from her friend following years of silence. Over the course of the conversation, we learn that Leila had visited Elena a few times after the latter had gotten married and had a child. This child (at seven years old), Leila realized on the last visit, was unusual and remarkable, and in the course of talking to him, she learned that he didn’t want to be an architect like his parents, but a horse. The two joked around pretending to be horses, but then Peta tried to walk on the balcony railing and fell to his death. Strangely enough, as the boy’s body was being taken away, further up the street, a horse that Leila had seen earlier that day is also lying in the street. She pays to have it cared for, and the whisper along the edges of the story is that the boy somehow figured out how to have a connection with, or become?, a horse in the end. In “The Woman from Atlantida,” two sisters on vacation stumble upon a poet who has tried to kill herself twice. The sisters visit her every night, clean up her house, and try to get her to stop drinking in order to help her start writing again. Tragically, on the night that the poet is finally able to leave the house, she and the narrator’s older sister run into the ocean, with terrible consequences.

“William in the Window,” like “A Fabulous Animal,” has at its heart a mystery tied up with an animal. Here, space and time seem to fold together. A woman living in Shanghai on a writer’s retreat meets a colleague (Denys) who is unusually connected to her cat William. When she learns that the cat has died back in Ireland, Denys becomes intensely depressed but then believes that she can hear William running around in her studio. At first, the narrator thinks this is just grief, but then she, too, hears what sounds like a cat rooting through the apartment. Then, the narrator sees her husband’s handprint on the bathroom wall, though he is thousands of miles away.

Finally, in “An Eye in the Throat” (first published in English in the Paris Review, 2024), a father lives for years with regret after his son accidentally swallows a battery and must undergo a tracheotomy. During one of the family’s long trips to a hospital, the boy manages to get lost and winds up being taken care of by a gruff couple at a gas station. For decades after that, the boy’s father receives phone calls from someone who doesn’t say a word and eventually hangs up. Believing this to be the man from the gas station, the father eventually finds these silent calls comforting. Following this incident, the son seems to withdraw from his father. After his son grows up and begins his own life and his wife goes off to lead hers, the father finds his way back to the gas station and the same strange couple. The man shows the father where the phone was that the boy could have used to call his parents, but the man asks how his son could have used the phone when he couldn’t speak. At that point, the man (and the reader) gets the strange feeling that, all these years, that silent phone call has been from his son, a physical manifestation of the boy’s attempt to reconnect with his father.

Regret, guilt, pain, and desperation form the backbone of these stories, with families and relationships that are strained often because of a lack of communication and understanding. Schweblin never disappoints, offering compelling, strange stories that stay with the reader long after they’re over.