Horror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?
Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s most recent collection of stories, her third in English, may not be categorisable as “horror” in the traditional sense, but it shares with the genre its spiritual core. In Schweblin’s vision, the barriers that separate one thing from another – the wanted from the unwanted, the environmental from the bodily, the unthreatening from the violent and chaotic – are so porous as to be nonexistent. True horror, she reminds us, is neither otherworldly or supernatural, it is simply the acknowledgment of life’s fundamental conditions.
The bravura opening story, Welcome to the Club, establishes a lexicon of images and themes from which the following stories weave a pattern: the ocean, madness, the flood of the exterior into the interior. A woman has tied rocks to her waist and attempted to drown herself. Touching the bottom, she inhales, drawing in with the lungful of water a new lucidity. Steered from her suicidal course, she surfaces and returns to a family life not so much altered as clarified in its inadequacy. Only her mysterious neighbour seems to understand. Recognising in her a morbidness with which he too is familiar, he teaches her to cope by mastering death – hunting and skinning animals. His instruction, given while demonstrating how the skin of an animal can be sliced from the bone, is telling. “You have to open it like a book,” he says. Inside, we infer, is something to be learned. Watching him, the woman is seized by an intrusive thought: “What I want is for him to skin me.”
In the collection’s standout piece, the eerie and remarkably moving An Eye in the Throat, the human body is even more dramatically laid open. Having swallowed a battery, a child is given a tracheotomy, and through this new portal the world and his sense of himself are transfigured. “I’m so open that sometimes I get confused,” he thinks, “– am I inside or out? A body, punctured like this – is it still a body?” Not only is the child’s consciousness now centred around this opening in his throat, the lives of his parents revolve around it too, “as if all the space in the house were entering me through that hole”. Unable to speak, the silent child intuits his father’s fears and, in the ultimate loosening of the boundaries between selves, his anxious inner monologue as he carefully bathes his son: “I have to keep the water out, thinks my father in the bathroom … I have to keep the water out.” Pained by the constant awareness of his parents’ anguish, the child comes to feel as if his parents share his wound. “There is a hole in my throat, a hole in my body that hurts in theirs … if I stick a finger in the hole that is mine but that hurts in the body of another, if I probe it, if I prod it, what I touch in there – is that my father?”
Schweblin’s prose, translated with exquisite precision by her regular translator Megan McDowell, avoids all the stylistic traps of the generically mystical. There is no gauziness, no obfuscatory veil. Schweblin’s aim is neither to mystify nor to distort. Instead, she looks at the world directly, piercing its deceptive surface, allowing the reader to do the same. In this choice we detect the message of the genuine mystic: visionary experience must be rendered in the language of the everyday because, viewed correctly, the everyday is the gateway to the visionary.
Such directness and clarity of language opens a unique emotional terrain where fear and compassion conjoin. For Schweblin, the state of porousness and fragility that arouses terror is also precisely the state through which we access that which fear holds out of reach: intimacy, care and healing. In The Woman from Atlántida, two girls take it upon themselves to help Pitys, a struggling alcoholic poet. Hoping that she will once again find inspiration, they visit her daily to wash her and clean her home. Many years later, an aged Pitys continues to visit one of the girls, now a hairdresser, and allows her to rinse from her matted hair the smell of “sea, of alcohol, and dead snails” – a tidal legacy of trauma that must be gently, regularly washed away.
To care for someone is to allow oneself to be proximate, however briefly, to a universal frailty – the certainty of illness, old age and death; the raw material of our fears. In Schweblin’s stories, this cycle is eternal. The world in moments of violence and tragedy reveals itself; bodies and minds become terrifyingly open. In that openness, care becomes possible, but leads in turn to new wounds and losses. Through the artful sequencing of the collection, Schweblin is able to map this process of decay and renewal not only within stories, but across them, until, in the final story, A Visit from the Chief, fear and healing find new alignment. Visiting her senile mother in a care home, Lidia finds another resident who has wandered off. She ends up taking her home, hoping to keep her safe until the staff can come and collect her. Instead, the woman’s son arrives, pulls out a gun, and conducts a robbery that doubles as a twisted therapy session. “Tell me your shitty problem!” He shouts. “What hurts?” Terrified, Lidia tells him. Perhaps she has been helped, perhaps traumatised, perhaps both. Either way she has been altered, and now finds herself, like the reader of Schweblin’s stories, in the space on the other side of terror – a space of openness, fragility and strange reassurance.
• Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, translated by Megan McDowell, is published by Picador (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
