The Houseguest

July 9, 2018
These 12 stories from Dávila are the first of the Mexican author’s to be translated into English and show her terrifying knack for letting horror seep into the commonplace and the domestic. In “Moses and Gaspar,” a man takes in his recently deceased brother’s pets and finds his life disintegrating; the story is all the more haunting because the reader never knows exactly what creatures the two pets are. In the title story, a woman’s distracted husband brings a mysterious man to their house, and the woman becomes unsettled by his lurking presence. In one of the best stories, “Musique Concrète,” a man’s longtime friend, Marcela, discovers that her husband is cheating on her. At night, Marcela is threateningly visited by the other woman, who resembles a toad. Filled with nightmarish imagery (“Sometimes I saw hundreds of small eyes fastened to the dripping windowpanes”) and creeping dread, Dávila’s stories plunge into the nature of fear, proving its force no matter if its origin is physical or psychological, real or imagined: “Even if is exaggerating, these things do exist and they have destroyed her, they exist like these flames dancing in the fireplace.”

September 15, 2018
The borders between the animal, human, and spirit worlds are constantly breached in these creepy magical realist tales of grief and obsession.Dávila's 12 short stories begin with "Moses and Gaspar," about Señor Kraus, who returns to his dead brother's apartment to collect the dogs he left behind. Moses and Gaspar become a complicated "inheritance from [his] unforgettable brother." Many creatures are more human than animal in Dávila's work, and the dogs' "screams" disturb Kraus' neighbors, while Kraus becomes increasingly animalistic. The dogs' grief comes to wreck his life. Similar connections to the animal world are found in other stories; "The Houseguest" features a jealous wife and an unnamed visitor her husband brings home: "His nourishment was limited entirely to meat; he wouldn't touch anything else." He hovers over the sleeping members of the house, watching them, until eventually the wife is driven mad. In "Oscar," a family lives to serve a dictatorial creature who controls all who enter the house from his place in the cellar: "He was the first to eat and allowed no one to taste their food before him. He knew everything, saw everything. He shook the iron door of the cellar with fury, and shouted when something displeased him. At night he indicated, with sounds and signs of objection, when he wanted them to go to bed, and often when he wanted them to get up. He ate large amounts, voraciously, and without enjoyment...grotesquely." Dávila's animals are humanized--familiar to anyone who has lived with a cat or a dog--but their holds on the humans of her stories are tyrannical. Other tales deal with the power of the imagination to create real fear: "Fragment of a Diary" is a series of meditations on degrees of pain by a character who wishes to develop tolerance as an art. In "End of a Struggle," Durán witnesses himself walking by with a former lover, then follows to see his other life.Brief, macabre stories that twist our obsessions with animals and our own thoughts. Like Poe for the new millennium.

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December 1, 2018

Eerie, fantastical, even slightly macabre, Dávila's stories are also persuasively real; they could be happening to you (though you hope not). After the death of his brother, Señor Kraus cannot abandon two undefined creatures, Moses and Gaspar, who mourn their master's passing. But they make such a racket when he brings them home that the neighbors complain, and he ends up caught between empathy and anger at how his brother's legacy has wrecked his life. Elsewhere, a young woman sits daily on her apartment building's stairs, the place she has chosen to suffer. Indeed, she seems to have turned suffering into an art, and though one can't be certain, her pain seems connected to a mysterious presence (real? imagined?) for whom she bitterly longs. VERDICT A longtime prize winner in Mexico who successfully plumbs fear and desire, Dávila is finally getting her deserved debut in English, and fans of both literary and fantasy will clamor.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.