Each of these stories is equal parts Hitchcock film and razor blade: austere, immaculately crafted, profoundly unsettling, and capable of cutting you. Amparo Dávila is Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortazár by way of Somers, and I’m so grateful she’s in translation.
— Carmen Maria Machado
Like those of Kafka, Poe, Leonora Carrington, or Shirley Jackson, Amparo Dávila’s stories are terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted—you’ll finish each one gasping for air.
With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, who makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some sort of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest—Dávila’s debut collection in English—you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.
Each of these stories is equal parts Hitchcock film and razor blade: austere, immaculately crafted, profoundly unsettling, and capable of cutting you. Amparo Dávila is Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortazár by way of Somers, and I’m so grateful she’s in translation.
— Carmen Maria Machado
Readers of Dávila’s stories find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to forget them.
— Margaret Randall, * World Literature Today *
Reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Franz Kafka, and Edgar Allen Poe, Davila tests the limits of fiction.
— Ploughshares
Dávila is a marvel, and this book casts a delightful and disconcerting spell.
— Los Angeles Times
Mexico’s answer to Shirley Jackson. Dávila radiates an interesting sense of unease and calamity. For a very long time, women have sought comfort in the darkness when their own lives were full of quiet despair. It is this silent scream which permeates The Houseguest.
— NPR
Mexico’s high priestess of horror. The world Dávila imagines weighs on the brain like some sort of delirium.
— Southwest Review
For the first time, we finally have a collection of her stories translated into English and they’re as good as, as uncanny and mesmerizing as, some of the best work by Kafka or Poe.
— Literary Hub
Brief and terrifying, The Houseguest leaves one feeling that nothing is solid, that reality is a precarious and ever-changing thing, and that it doesn’t take much to render the ordinary unrecognizable.
— Lauren P., Powell's Bookstore
Like Poe for the new millennium.
— Kirkus
The Houseguest will make you paranoid; you will second guess every shadow and slight movement that catches your eye. Amparo Dávila’s prose, her psychological awareness, and the beauty of her characters’ misery is encompassing. I cannot believe that this is the first that I am experiencing Dávila in English.
— Nick Buzanski, Book Culture
It’s a thrill to find that the rumors about Amparo Dávila’s stories are utterly true. In barely seven pages, The Houseguest, her titular tale, distills fear and madness into an iconic horror story. While her work inevitably attracts comparisons to Leonora Carrington, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shirley Jackson, Dávila is a singular talent.
— Stephanie Valdez, Co-owner of Community Bookstore
The work of Amparo Dávila is unique in Mexican Literature. There is no one like her, no one with that introspection and complexity.
— Elena Poniatowska
Amparo Dávila’s work reveals a short-storyteller equal to the best practitioners of that form in Latin America. The subject matter of her tales is universal. Amparo’s admirable stories, combining the everyday with the fantastic in human experience, give her work an artistic integrity found only in the creations of the Argentine master Jorge Luis Borges.
— The New York Times
Extraordinary.
— Julio Cortázar
Filled with nightmarish imagery (“Sometimes I saw hundreds of small eyes fastened to the dripping windowpanes”) and creeping dread, Dávila’s stories plunge into the nature of fear, proving its force no matter if its origin is physical or psychological, real or imagined.
— Publishers Weekly
