Like those of Kafka or Poe, Amparo Dávila’s stories are masterful, terrifying, and mesmerizing—you’ll finish reading each story gasping for air. With acute psychological insight, Dávila follows her characters to the limits of desire, paranoia, insomnia, loneliness, and fear. She is a writer obsessed with obsession, she makes nightmares come to life through the everyday: loneliness sinks in easily like a razor-sharp knife, some form of evil lurks in every shadow, delusion takes the form of strange and very real creatures. After reading The Houseguest, her debut collection in English, you’ll wonder how this secret was kept for so long.