I’m a Samanta Schweblin completist – Little Eyes is essential, Mouthful of Birds blew me away, and I included a story from it in my Personal Anthology. Even then, somehow I didn’t even know this collection of short stories was published until a few weeks ago.
Seven Empty Houses, translated as usual by Megan McDowell and winner of the 2022 National Book Award for Translated Literature, is Schweblin at her peak: tidier than her wilder Mouthful of Birds or Little Eyes, but still dripping with creeping dread. It’s less supernatural, more anchored in the contemporary, with a heartbreaking core and a thread of mental instability that’s as delicious as it is unsettling.
These aren’t haunted houses in the ghost-story sense—they’re hollowed out by human fragility, grief, and unravelling minds. Schweblin has a knack for making the everyday feel like a trap. In “None of That,” a mother and daughter case rich neighborhoods, but the mom’s bizarre behaviour flips the daughter’s world into quiet panic. “An Unlucky Man” starts with a girl’s sister drinking bleach, landing in a hospital where a stranger’s creepy kindness feels like a lifeline gone wrong. The centrepiece, novella “Breath From the Depths,” broke my heart. Lola, an elderly woman sliding into dementia, fixates on her new neighbors—a mother and son who echo her dead child. Her paranoia and grief are unbelievably raw and relatable.
That mental instability runs like a current through the stories—characters teeter, often (maybe) losing their grip on reality. Lola’s dementia in “Breath” is the loudest, but you see it in the mother’s erratic theft, the sister’s bleach incident, even the vague panic of “Out,” where a man’s routine cracks. Schweblin doesn’t spell it out; she lets the unease simmer, and it’s intoxicating. Her prose is sparse yet razor-sharp.
Compared to Schweblin’s earlier work, this feels more grounded—less of Mouthful’s surrealness or Little Eyes’s Black Mirror vibes, more like watching someone’s breakdown caught on a security cam.
Schweblin is a genius at making the familiar terrifying, and Seven Empty Houses is another slim collection that hits like a sledgehammer.
Further Reading
Read “My Parents and My Children”
