Monsters and Melancholics

Good and Evil and Other Stories by Samanta Schweblin, translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell. Knopf, 192 pages. 2025

In his 1917 essay Mourning and Melancholia, Sigmund Freud identified two kinds of loss. First, there’s mourning, the “reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one,” a fixed process with a discernible end. But the second kind, melancholia, is marked by a refusal to move beyond the site of mourning. Melancholics, according to Freud, are of “a pathological disposition” dwelling in rampant contradiction. The melancholic refuses to move; she clings to habits, repeats cycles, and circles memories until, eventually, the lost object fades into the background. Giorgio Agamben’s gloss on melancholia was that “not only is it unclear what object has been lost, it is uncertain that one can speak of a loss at all.”

In Good and Evil and Other Stories, Samanta Schweblin’s disquieting, seductive new story collection, translated by her longtime collaborator Megan McDowell, melancholic characters inhabit nearly every page. The traces of loss linger in the mother who believes her son has been reincarnated as a horse, in an older woman washing the hair of an alcoholic who witnessed her sister’s tragic death decades earlier, in a father who mourns his son after a near-death experience despite the fact that the child is still alive. Since we seldom encounter the original lost objects of obsessive affection—sometimes, we doubt their existence altogether—their mourner is the focus. Through careful omissions, obsessive repetition, and uncanny resemblances, Schweblin captures characters mired in loops of never-ending loss. But in this collection, melancholy also extends a strange type of solace, as if those who hang on to death and loss do so because it’s the only thing offering life any meaning.

Schweblin, an Argentinian based in Berlin, has won the Casa de las Américas Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, and has been nominated several times for the International Booker Prize. She’s often grouped with a larger cohort of Latin American female writers, including Mariana Enriquez, Mónica Ojeda, and Agustina Bazterrica, discussed as a second “Latin American boom.” In their explorations of paranormal activity, violent kidnappings, and domestic ghosts, these writers have unearthed the anxieties below the surface of everyday life. Unlike the male-dominated, magical realist, mid-century Latin American boom—which included Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, and Gabriel García Márquez—this new movement is loosely organized around horror and the gothic; these women are a bit freakier than their male predecessors. In their nods to Horacio Quiroga and María Luisa Bombal—just as much as Anglophone authors like Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft—these writers have built upon classical horror. While magical realism’s distrust of market logic, fears of globalization, and depiction of the mysteries of economic exchange were seen as a sentimentalization of the past, contemporary Latin American horror recasts those elements as a pessimism toward the future.

Good and Evil and Other Stories is oriented around the similarly dark register that characterizes Schweblin’s earlier work, including Seven Empty Houses and Mouthful of Birds, though it expands their emphasis on the minutiae of domestic life to look beyond the narrow confines of the home. These stories deftly mine the fears and neuroses we go to great lengths to hide—our obsessions, parasitical impulses, and inability to say no when we know we should. Many of them reside in an uncomfortable in-between space, toggling somewhere between the absurd and the uncanny through writing that is unsentimental yet lyrical, succinct yet evocative. (It’s also a style that is no doubt challenging to evoke as a translator, though McDowell masterfully accomplishes it.)

It’s a style that allows Schweblin to operate without monsters, beasts, or political antagonists. In these stories, evil is not external, but imminent to the self. Her characters don’t flee violence; they often run toward it with open arms. In the opening story, she highlights a suicidal mother’s macabre relationship to a pet rabbit. In a private moment, a neighbor, who catches her attempt and failure to commit suicide, gives her advice. Asking her if she loves her daughters enough, he says, “If the guilt is strong enough, you’ll need to stay to take care of them.” He hands her a knife and shows her how he skins the game he hunts. “Pain. That’s what you have to provoke,” he tells her, “some pain every day.” Metabolizing this information, she goes back into her home, where her daughters lie soundly asleep. She takes the pet rabbit Blimp, which she finds “tangled in the older one’s arms,” and walks with it to the kitchen. She grips the rabbit, “pressing it against the sink,” so as to make sure it doesn’t make noise. Like so many times throughout the collection, Schweblin manages to hold that same grip around the reader’s neck. “I’m thinking about what to do now, how to do it. I’m thinking about how this will spatter the kitchen and I’ll have to clean it well, or else the girls will see the disaster first thing in the morning.” In that moment, she appears to rationalize how reveling in small moments of pain might be just enough to keep her from taking her own life. Unlike some of the other horror writers who mourn a promised future, Schweblin’s stories often show how the future we are mourning is one we have, or thought we had, created ourselves. And it is also one we are slowly destroying, purposefully and with pleasure.

“The Woman from Atlántida,” one of the collection’s more harrowing stories, opens with an older woman, formerly suicidal, unshowered, and reeking of alcohol, walking into the salon where she is a regular. The unnamed narrator tells us, “Someone would head her off and lead her discreetly to the back of the shop so the other customers didn’t have to see or smell her.” We learn that the woman, Pitys, is a poet whose raging alcoholism has left her unable to produce new work. The story then jumps back in time to a family vacation in the small beach town of Atlántida, where the narrator and her older, brazen sister first encountered a fragile Pitys. The two girls become obsessed with bringing her back to health with a series of elaborate schemes to break into Pitys’s house in an attempt to save her from suicide. Over the course of one short summer, the sisters develop an uncanny symbiosis with the failed poet, taking care of her, treating her with the delicacy one would use to handle a fallen bird, washing her hair, making her food—all in an attempt to help her reclaim the lucidity she needs to make art. Just when Pitys seems on the precipice of reaching sobriety, the three women walk into the ocean, and the eldest sister is swept away in the current and drowned. The story is less about addiction and more about the transformative experience of mourning. As the narrator tells us:

In the image my past self still gazes at my sister in a way that reminds there was a time when my entire happiness depended on her eyes and on her mood, a time when I would have followed her anywhere as long as, every once in a while, she would click her tongue at me, or, miraculously, call me by my name.

The surviving sister holds on to these images and does so by taking care of Pitys, carefully combing her hair just as her older sister would have done. “The Woman from Atlántida” dramatically focuses on an obsessive return to the pain and suffering of the narrator’s original trauma and insists on its value. The narrator questions Pitys’s failed suicide attempt, noting, “Maybe not fully learning your lessons is ultimately what keeps you alive.” Sometimes it’s the refusal to fully move on that makes it possible to keep going.

The collection’s other stories articulate an obsession with a return to the site of trauma. A hairdresser’s chair, a gas station, a perch for a cat—Schweblin uses all these things to illustrate how the melancholic keeps crisis alive. The characters undergo tragic recursion in a way that gives them meaning. In “A Fabulous Animal,” when Elena, a woman on her deathbed calls a longtime friend, Leila, Elena makes one final request of her friend. Elena asks her friend to recall memories of her son, who died suddenly decades before. Like in so many of the stories in the collection, Schweblin shows the mourner wanting more, wanting to extend the duration of the mourning beyond the immediate present.

Because horror is often about dangers felt, not seen, the genre is often read as political allegory. And critics have characterized Schweblin’s fiction and that of her Latin American boom compatriots as an attempt to articulate the horrors of their respective countries’ political violence, which have largely been left out of the domain of state-sponsored journalism and, until recently, public accounts. This literature often mourns the lives of those who were lost to state-sponsored violence and gives voice to the traumas that result from living in a society where death has been wielded as a political tool. Schweblin, however, has rarely pointed to Argentina’s military dictatorship as an inspiration. When asked in an interview about the war’s influence, she described the role generic conventions—specifically, the appearance of monsters—play in her stories.

While other writers might dabble in gore, she mentioned being drawn to monsters just below the surface. “One can’t see the monsters,” she noted, because they are psychological, inducing fear through suspense and silence rather than violence and aggression. She traces this back to the types of conversations her family had about Argentina’s past. In her home, political subjects were avoided and “suspiciously depoliticized.” Without directly addressing disappearance or political violence, she explained how understood, unspoken political violence can create two different horrors: one gory, violent, and highly sensorial, and another that is deeply psychological, invisible, and atmospheric.

This is one reason why Schweblin’s brand of melancholia is distinct from that of her compatriots. She does not often show others sharing in mourning. There is no polity, no opportunity in her stories for mass melancholia. Instead, her characters remain isolated, reveling in their pain, which is often self-inflicted. In “An Eye in the Throatm” a slow-moving yet terrible accident happens to a young boy, watched over by his anxious father. The young boy narrates the story to us from the future, placing us in the logic of the child. “If I don’t clearly understand an object’s purpose, I suck it, I bite it, I bang it against another thing.” Despite his father’s dutiful watch, he swallows a battery, and after several failed surgeries, his vocal cords are irreparably damaged and can no longer produce sound. He learns to sign and has a thriving social life; however, his father fails to learn to communicate with him, creating a one-sided loss. In the end, the boy sits beside his father as he dies. “Don’t worry, Dad, we were happy, at first, and that’s enough. Everything’s going to be okay, Dad. And since he doesn’t answer, since he has never answered me, I put my finger inside that hole that’s like an eye, and I touch inside.” He points to the deep dark place where his father’s imagined loss sits, a subjective melancholy that may mark us all beyond political corollary.

Though Schweblin has dabbled in longer narrative forms—the novels Fever Dream and Little Eyes—she has always returned to the short story. It’s a form whose compactness and constricted space make for an apt vehicle for obsession. These stories delimit their action to a handful of sites, and they often revolve around the development of a character’s inner life. While mourning might serve as the denouement to a longer narrative, as we see in the ever-present death in Enriquez’s Our Share of Night, the short story formalizes the melancholic tendency toward repetition through the limitations of its length, setting, and character. The reader’s inability to move narratively beyond the site of trauma creates a familiarity that offers a kind of satisfaction in the absence of a novel’s extended descent. Just as the melancholic returns to the site of loss, the reader must return to one or two discrete moments, settings, and characters. And yet, Schweblin’s melancholia cannot be described away by formal constraint.

Melancholia can be described as a sadistic process. But this collection suggests it cannot be understood apart from ineffable pleasure. It is only in loss that one attempts representation, in desperate pursuit to remember the lost object, and begins to imagine. And then, one begins to fantasize and ultimately imagines life differently. To keep the loss alive is to keep the productive imagination alive. As Julia Kristeva reminds us, if “there is no writing other than the amorous, there is no imagination that is not, overtly or secretly, melancholy.”