The Argentinian writer maps a journey through fear, healing and the terrifying permeability of our boundaries
H
orror, in essence, is about porousness. Our terrors take varied forms but horror probes their single, existential source: the terrifying permeability of our boundaries. If spirits can swim back from the world of the dead, if the living body can degrade to the point where it becomes malleable or parasitically possessed, what hope can there be for our fantasy of security and selfhood?
Argentinian writer Samanta Schweblin’s most recent collection of stories, her third in English, may not be categorisable as “horror” in the traditional sense, but it shares with the genre its spiritual core. In Schweblin’s vision, the barriers that separate one thing from another – the wanted from the unwanted, the environmental from the bodily, the unthreatening from the violent and chaotic – are so porous as to be nonexistent. True horror, she reminds us, is neither otherworldly or supernatural, it is simply the acknowledgment of life’s fundamental conditions.
The bravura opening story, Welcome to the Club, establishes a lexicon of images and themes from which the following stories weave a pattern: the ocean, madness, the flood of the exterior into the interior. A woman has tied rocks to her waist and attempted to drown herself. Touching the bottom, she inhales, drawing in with the lungful of water a new lucidity. Steered from her suicidal course, she surfaces and returns to a family life not so much altered as clarified in its inadequacy. Only her mysterious neighbour seems to understand. Recognising in her a morbidness with which he too is familiar, he teaches her to cope by mastering death – hunting and skinning animals. His instruction, given while demonstrating how the skin of an animal can be sliced from the bone, is telling. “You have to open it like a book,” he says. Inside, we infer, is something to be learned. Watching him, the woman is seized by an intrusive thought: “What I want is for him to skin me.”
