Christina Henry

"She asks if he talks to me. I tell her the truth: yes, or more like he chats—because he talks less and less, he’s disappearing into the Internet; Marco is letters that titillate, and sometimes he just disappears without waiting for an answer—but that he never tells me what’s going on, what he’s feeling, what he wants."

I tagged it horror but maybe only half the stories fit into what you'd typically call horror - most are realist with only a quick encounter with something maybe supernatural, or the intrusion of the very real horrors of real life. I came into it with the wrong expectations because of the genre tag but as I got used to it I found it compelling. Quite a few stories not only lack resolution but even a sense of what exactly happened - we get a dip into the other side, the terrifying stuff that underpins middle class normality, but we only get to see the horror from the edges. There are very obvious constant reoccurring themes - great poverty and slums, the class divide, the legacy of the dictatorships (including Paraguay), the oppression of women (all of these stories are told from the perspective of women). Even when the themes are obvious and the "horror" level isn't that strong, all the stories are properly creepy and stick with you. It brings up your uneasiness around the things you can't quite see, that are bred from capitalism and the patriarchy and have to be suppressed and fenced out in case they take you. Great writing.… (mer)