Seven Empty Houses
by Samanta Schweblin
Translated by Megan McDowell
Argentine author Samanta Schweblin forms part of a new wave of Latin American writers of weird and speculative fiction. Seven Empty Houses is her latest book to be translated into English (by Schweblin's faithful translator Megan McDowell). It consists of a slim volume of seven short stories, all of which tap into the Gothic trope of the “empty” or “abandoned” house.
In traditional horror fiction, the empty house is “shunned”, because more often than not, it is “haunted” by ghosts, demons or by memories of violence and grief. The image of the “haunted house” is powerful precisely because it turns on its head our expectation that houses should be safe havens of domesticity. None of the houses in Schweblin’s collection are literally vacant or haunted. Their “emptiness” is figurative, in the sense that the houses are marked by or tainted with a sense of loss – whether loss of memory and reason (as in the longest story “Breath from the Depths”) , or loss of innocence, or simply an absence which turns safe spaces into dangerous ones.
Schweblin manages to
create a sense of unease using the simplest of means. Take the opening story, “None
of That”. A mother and her daughter end up in the house
of a young family. The mother takes over the house, rearranging things,
behaving as if the house is hers, and finally making off with a sugar
bowl. Retold in a few words, the premise
seems downright banal. But the story effectively conveys an escalating feeling
of panic. What would you do if a stranger invades your house and doesn’t want
to leave? Those who like their horror
gory and melodramatic will need to look elsewhere. Lovers of the unheimlich
will be delighted.
- 304 pages, Kindle Edition
- October 18, 2022 by Oneworld Publications
- 9780861544332
- English
No comments:
Post a Comment