the houseguest and other stories by amparo dávila

In a reality in which a virus made all animal consumption impossible, people now farm and eat other humans. Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica (Argentina)īazterrica's dystopia has a horrific subject matter and requires a strong stomach. Here are 10 horror books from writers around the world, offering you a global journey that goes from the macabre to the gory. If you are a newbie to the horror genre and the only author you know is Stephen King, you might be wondering where to begin. Now my novel Mexican Gothic is a bestseller my narco vampire noir Certain Dark Things is getting a re-release in 2021, after years of hearing vampires are dead (pun intended). A few years ago I was told a book set in Mexico would never sell.

Not only is horror creeping back onto bookshelves, but writers of color are popping up more often in this category. Horror shifted out of the mainstream, to small and independent presses.įortunately, things seem to be changing. The boom and collapse of the horror novel in the 1990s, especially after the disappearance of the iconic Dell Abyss line, left a huge crater. When I tell people I’ve written horror stories they generally stare and ask, 'Why?' It’s also been a neglected genre. Filled with nightmarish imagery ('Sometimes I saw hundreds of small eyes fastened to the dripping windowpanes') and creeping dread, D vila's stories plunge into the nature of fear, proving its force no matter if its origin is physical or psychological, real or imagined: 'Even if is exaggerating, these things do exist and they have destroyed her, they exist like these flames dancing in the fireplace.Horror has a bad reputation. At night, Marcela is threateningly visited by the other woman, who resembles a toad. In one of the best stories, 'Musique Concr te,' a man's longtime friend, Marcela, discovers that her husband is cheating on her. In the title story, a woman's distracted husband brings a mysterious man to their house, and the woman becomes unsettled by his lurking presence. In 'Moses and Gaspar,' a man takes in his recently deceased brother's pets and finds his life disintegrating the story is all the more haunting because the reader never knows exactly what creatures the two pets are. These 12 stories from D vila are the first of the Mexican author's to be translated into English and show her terrifying knack for letting horror seep into the commonplace and the domestic.

The houseguest and other stories by amparo dávila