Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” is one example discussed by Nelson. The authors she mentions orbit what Maggie Nelson calls the “art of cruelty” that is, they affect “precision, transgression, purgation, productive unease, abjectness, radical exposure, uncanniness, unnerving frankness…” (Nelson 6). One, that Dávila belongs in the same camp as these other writers two, that Dávila is part of a feminine revision of that camp. I’m particularly interested in Maria Machado’s reading, from which I glean two ideas. What happens to Aira when filtered through Carrington? Does Kafka by way of Ogawa look like either Kafka or Ogawa? Or do they become one of those digital face-swaps, where both people look like neither? The publisher’s synopsis compares Dávila’s work to that of Franz Kafka, Edgar Allan Poe, and Shirley Jackson: “terrifying, mesmerizing, and expertly crafted.” There’s also a blurb by Carmen Maria Machado: “Amparo Dávila is Franz Kafka by way of Ogawa, Aira by way of Carrington, Cortázar by way of Somers …” Maria Machado gives a head-spinning, kaleidoscopic lineage-one that, like any, invites elaboration and contestation. It introduces English speakers to an author long-acclaimed in Mexico for what one of her translators, Matthew Gleeson, describes as uncanny and fantastic works that “revolve around characters gripped by extreme states of mind, psyches stoked with an uncertain mix of imagination and fact” (“The Crying Cat”). It’s a set of scary stories, and a scary set of stories. It’s no coincidence that Amparo Dávila’s first collection of short stories to appear in English, The Houseguest, was published in the month of October, when we commemorate the dead.

“Ah, one learns when one has to one learns when one needs a way out one learns at all costs.”

The houseguest amparo