Good and evil and other stories

Argentine writer Schweblin mines readers' deepest fears in her striking third story collection (after Seven Empty Houses). It opens with "Welcome to the Club," about a wife and mother's aborted suicide attempt and subsequent chastising by her neighbor, a reclusive hunter who gives her a knife to butcher her daughters' pet rabbit ("You have to pay a price," he tells her). In "An Eye in the Throat," a man looks back on the traumatic episode from his childhood that left him mute. Memories of long-ago calamities also fuel "A Fabulous Animal," in which the narrator gets a call from her old friend Leila, who wants to talk about the narrator's role in the accident that killed Leila's seven-year-old son many years earlier, and "The Woman from Atlantida," in which a woman remembers the summer night she and her older sister snuck out of their house as children to swim in the ocean, and her sister drowned. In the spectacular and disturbing closer, "A Visit from the Chief," a woman visiting her mother in a nursing home brings an escaped patient to her apartment only to have the woman's son show up to rob and brutalize her. Each entry is more luminous and shocking than the last. This establishes Schweblin as a master storyteller. Agent: Johanna Castillo, Writers House. (Sept.)

Startling, otherworldly encounters reveal universal emotions in six fierce short stories. Schweblin, who writes both novels and short stories, proves once again here how urgent and efficient fiction can be. The six tart slices that make up this bitter dark-chocolate orange are a provocative answer to the Beatles' question: "All the lonely people / Where do they all belong?" The book's lonely people include a woman who tries to drown herself; estranged friends on the phone reliving an accident; a 2-year-old boy who has lost the ability to speak; a writer at a residency in Shanghai; the grown daughter of a dementia patient; and two young sisters determined to rehabilitate a shattered poet. These are forces of nature with powerful intellects, internationally situated (Schweblin is from Buenos Aires and lives in Berlin), conversant in upheaval and despair, who make startling leaps of time and circumstances. In these stories, each person hungry to connect has a counterpart who can't or won't respond. Attempts at closing the gap create guilt, foreboding, or a sharper awareness: We love others but are ultimately alone. And yet each story sings with meaning the reader gleans from witnessing. As one of the young sisters notes of a mysterious house: "You had to stand there for a moment, very still, and get used to that even darker darkness, before you could finally see anything." These stories, too, require an adjustment of the eyes, so that just after we are shocked by an eerie threat (a ghostly cat, a telepathic neighbor, a violent guest), we realize we have been party to a central human truth. Some revelations come in the form of body horror, and the gore can be hilariously goofy--a welcome lightness to the more somber scenes of tender caretaking (or unapologetic cruelty). Schweblin and veteran translator McDowell trace the slim barrier between perception and reality with masterful narration, piercing dialogue, stealthy wit, and psychological precision. Outrageously original and deeply felt stories with an indelible effect. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.