Good and Evil

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.)