Amparo Dávila (1928–2020)

Davila borrows an element of style from Shirley Jackson in that the horror in her stories is relatable and familiar, like it could happen in your own life. However, where Davila departs is that unlike Jackson's mundane, human horror, Davila draws the reader toward something truly horrifying and incomprehensible, but never opens the door quite wide enough to see inside. It's this veiled nature of what it is we're supposed to be terrified of that makes it all the more effective.

Everything I had read led me to eagerly anticipate Dávila’s “expertly crafted” stories: she “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.” Well…yes and no. Those are her themes, yes. But her writing left a lot to be desired, at least for me. I usually find that story collections include a few really good ones, some that leave me cold, and what I make show more of the rest usually helps me decide what I think overall. Here, pretty much everything in the collection left me unimpressed. I’m not usually a fan of horror (or horror-like) stories, but really well-done writing rises above genre and still impresses me. Sadly, virtually every story in this collection was both ominous and unsatisfying—not a good combination. Not a single story was or explained or worse, explainable. Nearly every story had an open ending, and often the endings weren’t even remotely satisfying, explanatory, or sensible. The reader was given no clues, no hints, nothing to work with, and worst of all, no logic. At the end of most stories, I simply scratched my head, confused and frustrated. I got the distinct sense that she was writing merely to create mood—which she does well—but that she had little interest in or use for plot. She just ended things when she was done with her mood. Few, if any, “conclusions” either concluded anything or explained anything, and too many didn’t even make sense. Not recommended. show less

There are some horror stories here, but more of psychological terror, as anxious people struggle, and fail, to overcome their fears and insecurities, all through a distorting, fantastical lens.
Awful animals inhabit several stories: malign cats, tortured snails and intimidating toads. Obviously, the humans are worse. There's an intriguing ambiguity, too, about whether the uncanny is happening or is a psychotic misapprehension.

There's a feminist strand in the depiction of women limited and show more abused by a casually misogynistic society, though the men definitely don't get it all their own way. There are, I think, subliminal themes including the duality of the domestic abuser, presenting a respectable face to the outside world, and a monstrous one in the home. And is that threatening, charismatic presence in another story a vampire, a demon, or an incestuous relative, perhaps the never-mentioned father? There's a story which now could perhaps feel ablist, while also illustrating the historical, and sadly all too contemporary, prejudice towards neuro-divergent people.

Dávila's stories are unsettlingly wonderful, and I hesitantly wonder what experiences she might have had to draw from. I wish more of her work was available in translation. show less

The stories here are strange, almost unearthly, and yet intimate and engrossing in a way I can't quite describe. The ones that struck me most were the titular story - The Houseguest - Moses and Gaspar, and Fragment of a Diary. Davila takes mundane, everyday things we take for granted and gives them a sinister undercurrent, of something slightly off, a feeling that permeates through all her stories. There's a sense of the absurd, too, thus earning the author's comparisons to Poe and show more Kafka.

I've noticed certain reviews drawing comparisons to Shirley Jackson, who is one of my favorite authors. However, I sensed only a passing semblance to her style, barring the unexpected twist endings, of course. There may have been some issues in translation as some parts felt off. This article in The Paris Review sheds more light on the process and the difficulty of transferring Davila's sense of "the mysterious, the unknown, that which is not within our grasp" over to English.

Some really great stories, some not so memorable ones. I had a decent time, especially as a fan of Poe, Kafka, and Jackson. show less