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3.91 AVERAGE
3.91 AVERAGE
challenging
dark
emotional
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Good and Evil and Other Stories is an engaging story collection from Samanta Schweblin. I had read one previous work by them and was interested in reading more of their work. I blew through these six stories quickly. Death and/or guilt permeate much of the collection, with a side of magical realism. In Welcome to the Club, a woman is drawn to the lake behind her house- a push and pull of wanting to drown herself and wanting to go back to her house. In A Fabulous Animal, a woman calls someone she has not spoken with in years to tell her she is dying. An Eye in the Throat was a potent story about a family dealing with unrelenting guilt after an accident happens to their son that could have been avoided. This is a strong, short collection that despite the subject matter, I think many will appreciate.
Thank you to Knopf via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.
Thank you to Knopf via NetGalley for the advance reader copy in exchange for honest review.
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
The horror in Good and Evil and Other Stories is a kind of unease that lurks in your belly and you can't quite figure out why but you know something isn't right. In some of the stories, Schweblin does reveal the reason but in others leaves the reader to imagine for themselves what it is that's not right. What sets Schweblin apart from other writers of this genre is that there is often a theme of human kindness to her stories which seems to outshine the horror.
The stories are of varying lengths but easily read through in a single sitting. As with any short story collection, there were stories I liked more than others. The opening story, Welcome to the Club, was my least favourite. It felt like an odd choice for the first story as the narrator felt unreliable and seemed to be in some sort of trance-like state which made it hard to follow and engage. Luckily, I persevered and enjoyed all the other stories with my personal favourite being The Woman from Atlántida.
Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
The stories are of varying lengths but easily read through in a single sitting. As with any short story collection, there were stories I liked more than others. The opening story, Welcome to the Club, was my least favourite. It felt like an odd choice for the first story as the narrator felt unreliable and seemed to be in some sort of trance-like state which made it hard to follow and engage. Luckily, I persevered and enjoyed all the other stories with my personal favourite being The Woman from Atlántida.
Thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan for the ARC. All opinions are my own.
dark
mysterious
reflective
This latest collection from Schweblin builds on the quieter unnervingness of her previous one, Seven Empty Houses, this time focussing on human relationships rather than domesticity. Each familial, romantic, or friendly relationship has an uncanny element to it — a secret buried, a truth denied, or moment that cannot be moved past.
Schweblin has a gift for establishing character and mood in the opening beats of a story in quick, confident strokes that makes each one easy to get caught up in. From the opening shocker in which a woman submerges herself in the lake behind her house while her husband and daughters are out, then seemingly changes her mind, to the closing tale of a lonely women whose attempt at kindness goes wrong, it's easy to understand the theme of each story yet remains rewarding to dig deeper and mull them over.
I liked every story, but particular standouts for me were Welcome to the Club, which the moment I thought I'd got what was going on slithered away again like slippery moss at the bottom of a lake, and The Woman from Atlántida — the dreamlike wanderings of the two sisters, their weird relationship with the poet, the way in which no one seems to quite grasp the consequences of anything — so strange and good.
And of course, I can't not mention An Eye in the Throat. Ostensibly about the consequences of one moment of a father's inattention, I loved how much was layered into a brief glimpse into these characters' lives. The exploration of silences, guilt, love, and distance blew me away.
Thanks to Picador for my early copy!
Schweblin has a gift for establishing character and mood in the opening beats of a story in quick, confident strokes that makes each one easy to get caught up in. From the opening shocker in which a woman submerges herself in the lake behind her house while her husband and daughters are out, then seemingly changes her mind, to the closing tale of a lonely women whose attempt at kindness goes wrong, it's easy to understand the theme of each story yet remains rewarding to dig deeper and mull them over.
I liked every story, but particular standouts for me were Welcome to the Club, which the moment I thought I'd got what was going on slithered away again like slippery moss at the bottom of a lake, and The Woman from Atlántida — the dreamlike wanderings of the two sisters, their weird relationship with the poet, the way in which no one seems to quite grasp the consequences of anything — so strange and good.
And of course, I can't not mention An Eye in the Throat. Ostensibly about the consequences of one moment of a father's inattention, I loved how much was layered into a brief glimpse into these characters' lives. The exploration of silences, guilt, love, and distance blew me away.
Thanks to Picador for my early copy!
challenging
dark
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
emotional
mysterious
reflective
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I first discovered Samanta Schweblin in 2021 through her novel Little Eyes, a Black Mirror-esque novel that explores the dangers of advancing technology and its misuse. Since then I have read her short story collection Seven Empty Houses which presents an eerie and unsettling look at how the home can turn on its inhabitants despite supposing to be a place of safety. This new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, is a thoughtful rumination on connection, love, and grief in different forms.
The first story, Welcome to the club, follows a mother after a suicide attempt and how she navigates the reintegration into her family’s life. This looks at the lengths we’ll go to avoid causing pain to our loved ones and the unnerving sense of the unknown.
A Fabulous Animal explores what ties old friends together and why we hold onto those friendships, told over a phone call between a woman who ran away from tragedy and a woman who stayed.
William in the Window delves into grief and the human need for relatability. It also highlights the complex threads motivate us in our interactions and how, despite our seemingly vast individual differences, our emotions hold deep connections.
An Eye in the Throat shows the fractured bond between father and son after an accident that takes away the child’s ability to speak and how the father grapples with the guilt of a moment of distraction.
The Woman from Atlántida is my favourite story in this collection. A woman reminisces on a childhood summer with her sister where they became frequent visitors of a woman poet and begin to take care of her. The kindness of children is what really shines through in this story and how these echoes follow us through into the adults we become.
The last story in this collection, A Visit From the Chief, was honestly lost on me. At first I thought it was going to centre on the difficulty of caring for a relative with dementia and the perseverance of connection even with this challenging mental barrier. Then it turned into this weird house break-in and cartoon villain diatribe that just left me confused.
Overall, the themes in these stories bleed into one another and create a complex web of the deepest and often darkest parts of ourselves. I really like Schweblin’s writing style for the most part and will be reading more of her work in future!
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
‘’Madness scares you, it distracts you, but you have to look at it closely.’’
I have read Samanta Schweblin’s work extensively, and each time, I’m struck anew by the power of her writing. In just ten to twenty pages, she constructs riddles—quiet, contained, yet charged with emotional and psychological weight—that can spark hours of discussion. She transforms the mundane into the disturbing, turning everyday encounters into moments of quiet terror. If Fernanda Melchor tests the limits of your sanity with supernatural dread bleeding into reality, Schweblin does the opposite: she takes familiar relationships and recognisable emotions and quietly corrupts them. She invites you to reconsider what it means to age, to belong, to parent, to survive in a world where madness spreads silently, like an infection you didn’t know you were carrying.
The new collection, Good and Evil and Other Stories, published in 2025, continues her exploration of psychological fragility with chilling precision. The stories are brief but relentless. They don’t rely on overt horror or shock—they work like whispers at the edge of your mind, asking unsettling questions in deceptively ordinary settings.
‘’Mommy, are you happy?’’
Welcome to the Club: The story opens with a woman’s failed suicide attempt. What becomes immediately clear is that she is deeply depressed—but why? What has driven her to make a decision that would leave her two daughters without a mother? And who is the strange neighbour, the Hunter, who seems to know everything about her?
A story that raises a million questions and deliberately leaves the answers to the reader.
A Fabulous Animal: Two old friends talk on the phone. One of them is always on the run. The other is dying. After so many years, the only thing that unites them is the death of a boy and a horse…
William in the Window: In a writer’s retreat, two women become friends, sharing their worries about the ones they have left at home. One is afraid her husband will die without her. The other is afraid for her cat and gives little thought to her husband. How do you accept that kind of distance when your own partner is dying of cancer? And what does it mean when a dead animal appears to be watching you?
A quiet tale about the companionship of marriage—or the absence of it—and the human need to cling to whatever anchor life offers
‘’But at night, if the phone rings and my father picks up, no one answers.’’
An Eye in the Throat: Narrated by a precociously bright two-year-old, this is the story of a single moment that leads to the collapse of a family. As is often the case in Schweblin’s fiction, every page holds layers of secrets, instincts, confessions, and quiet mysteries.
One of the saddest stories I’ve ever read—deeply memorable and quietly haunting. A poignant study of a fractured bond between father and son.
‘’And you two?’’, he asked. ‘’What do you do to keep from getting bored?’’
My sister said, ‘’We sneak into other people’s houses.’’
The Woman from Atlantida: The visit of a client takes the narrator back to a summer of her childhood when she and her sister encountered mysterious characters such as a woman poet who seems to be coming from a different time. The story of an unsettling summer, of sisterhood, loneliness and addictions, of the kindness of children, the isolation that comes with age, and the moments of disaster that always find us unaware.
A Visit from the Chief: Unfortunately, this story fell flat for me and made little sense. It follows a troubled 60-year-old woman who can’t seem to decide whether she loves her daughter or resents her, while her mother and another elderly woman engage in bizarre antics at a hospice. Add a repulsive male character to the mix, and you’re left with a disappointing, disjointed narrative.
A weak and confusing ending to an otherwise haunting and incisive collection.
Despite its uneven conclusion, Good and Evil and Other Stories confirms once again Samanta Schweblin’s mastery of the short story form. Her writing is precise, eerie, and emotionally complex—never offering easy answers, but always provoking thought. These stories linger long after the last page, unsettling in the best possible way. For readers drawn to quiet horror, psychological unease, and the emotional fissures of ordinary life, this collection is well worth reading.
‘’Why don’t you talk to me?’’, asked the woman. ‘’Why don’t you ask me things?’’
Many thanks to Pan Macmillan and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/