Posts featuring Amparo Dávila

Yet So Alive: A Collection of Groundbreaking Latin American Horror Stories

April 1, 2024 | in Reviews | by Sharon Beriro

The horror in all of these stories slithers in stealth . . . it quietly intoxicates, revealing its true colors in a hypnotizing fashion.

Through the Night Like a Snake: Latin American Horror Stories, Two Lines Press, 2024

For some time now, Latin American literature has engrossed readers with magical realism, fantasy, surrealism, and most recently, horror. These aren’t necessarily the stories of the region’s most considered authors—Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, Horacio Quiroga, Amparo Dávila, and other giants among them—but rather the work of bold, fearless, and independent writers who, in the last decade, have honored and twisted these genres in unprecedented ways. Their work represents a new generation of talents, who are redefining their region’s legacy in gothic literature.

Many call it horror. Others, like Carmen Alemany Bay, a literary scholar at the University of Alicante, call it “narrativa de lo inusual”—narrative of the unusual, or the strange, defining a subgenre “in which the reader is ultimately the one who decides what is possible and what is not.” Whatever one wants to call it, the certainty remains that these voices are as powerful as they are unflinching, grounded by a sincerity and authenticity faithful to their geographies; that is to say, these stories are as “unusual” as they are Latin American, which is in part what makes Through the Night Like a Snake all the more visceral.

Something is Rotten—But What?: On The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius

November 10, 2021 | in Reviews | by Sabrina Parker Greene

“The Dolls” leaves you with a simple, haunting feeling—what is enough for a life?

The Dolls by Ursula Scavenius, translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, Lolli Editions, 2021

Ursula Scavenius has created an inexplicable environment in The Dolls, a collection of four stories that render the common traditions of narrative into cerebral mystery. Perhaps our characters are in Denmark, but what iteration of Denmark is it? She does not seem to call upon any particular reality or time period in which to place her characters; even the mention of actual years or eras, be they 1888 or 1999, don’t seem to hold much meaning. Amidst this ambiguity, you might say something is rotten in the state of Denmark. The epigraph of the text, deftly translated from the Danish by Jennifer Russell, reads: “I’ll tell the story, even if no one is listening.” While not necessarily a unique sentiment, it aptly sets up a book that comes to us in English translation, which has found itself a new set of readers who are ready to listen.

Fittingly, this book is part of Lolli’s New Scandinavian Literature series—and it does seem to live within that hint of reinvention, avoiding any stereotypically Danish or Scandinavian elements. There’s no hygge—that adulated brand of upper-middle-class coziness—here: everyone is decidedly uncomfortable. Nor can they be categorized under the beloved genre of Nordic noir—no outright crime exists in these stories. Instead, we have paranoia, dread, perhaps some doomsday prep, but no hardboiled investigation or detective work. Although Scavenius may not explicitly belong to the traditions of Scandinavian literature, you could thread her particular type of psychological penetration and sense of displacement with the likes of Clarice Lispector, Wuthering Heights, perhaps Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss or Amparo Dávila’s The Houseguest and Other Stories (translated by Matthew Gleeson and Audrey Harris), taking part in a global narrativization of women who find themselves in archaic or alternative lifestyles, or otherwise alone—either by their own accord or against their will. A timeless situation.