BookBrowse Reviews Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin

BookBrowse:

Good and Evil and Other Stories is as quietly eerie as you'd expect from Samanta Schweblin, one of Argentinian literature's masters of the uncanny.

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An unsatisfied mother returns home after nearly drowning herself, with only her brutish next door neighbor able to recognize how irreversibly the experience has changed her. An alcoholic poet receives kindness from two young women. When a senile old woman's son shows up brandishing a pistol, an attempt to protect her goes horribly wrong (or right, depending on your point of view).

The important thing to understand about these three stories (and the three others that make up this book) is that none of them is called "Good and Evil." This is a sly tweak of a typical naming convention for a short story collection: instead of one story lending the book its name, the title (and all six stories) makes it clear that "good" and "evil" are just tidy ways we can rationalize our ugliest, least explicable emotions.

Is the suicidal mother in "Welcome to the Club" evil for feeling briefly compelled to murder her daughters' pet rabbit? When she resists the urge and leaves the rabbit unharmed, does that make her good? Can any of us truly understand her, let alone judge her, if we've never stood under water with rocks tied around our waist, struck by a terrible lucidity?

That terrible lucidity extends to Schweblin's prose. Like fellow Argentinian Mariana Enriquez (another author translated by Megan McDowell), Schweblin writes with eerie precision, never hiding behind cheap surrealism. You know what you are looking at, even if it's something you'd rather not behold, and that clarity makes the stranger bits (like a child's possible transformation into a horse, or a boy musing philosophically on his own tracheotomy) so much more disquieting.

This being a collection of short stories, some are inevitably stronger than others. "William in the Window," about a writer's retreat in Shanghai that takes a strange turn when one writer's cat back home is poisoned, briefly achieves an uncanny frisson before deflating at the end. But it's hard to hold that against Good and Evil and Other Stories when you have something like "The Woman from Atlántida," a tale of gentleness and trauma that's sweet without being cloying, or "A Fabulous Animal," where a phone call between a former babysitter and a grieving mother with a terminal illness leads to the gradual acceptance of the supernatural. Careful readers can see what's coming, but that doesn't dull the impact one bit.

Then there's "An Eye in the Throat," the collection's centerpiece and its most haunting story. Like "A Fabulous Animal," it details something terrible happening to a child; unlike the former, it's written from the child's point of view. A young boy swallows a battery, causing extensive damage to his throat that requires a tracheotomy (see Beyond the Book). He observes the way this tragedy reshapes his relationship with his parents, as well as his parents' relationship with each other. Bath time becomes a fraught exercise in keeping the boy's stoma clear of water; hugs last longer and squeeze harder, even though the father feels increasingly alienated from his son. The boy is clear-eyed and eloquent, speaking well beyond his years even though he can no longer speak at all. "The problem is not that I can't speak," he says. "The problem is that because I don't speak, he won't look at me."

It's a miracle that the story doesn't come across as emotionally manipulative, but it doesn't. It may start as a parent's worst nightmare, "Incarnations of Burned Children" style, but it gradually becomes something else: a coming-of-age story, where the child grows up and becomes more than the worst thing that happened to him, even as his father refuses to stop torturing himself in penance. Like all of Schweblin's best stories, it settles into your chest and stays there for a good long while.

This review first ran in the October 8, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.