Amparo Dávila’s translated collection Behind the Gate & Other Stories reads like a fugue state of lucid dreams sewn together, where the dreamer is aware of the uncanny magical realism and accepts that the strange is possible, at least for a small window. Its characters maintain awareness of their haunted surroundings but without the agency to change the landscape. This petite collection with sprawling sentences holds some elements of body horror, like Griselda and the pond of eyes, but no gore.
Fans of Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado will enjoy the darker scenes of “The Tomb Garden” and “The Mirror.” Compared to the dark anthropomorphism of Agustina Bazterrica’s Nineteen Claws and a Black Bird, the inhabitants of Dávila’s stories run through various versions of fear and acceptance of their environment rather than baring their teeth at it.
In “Griselda,” a young house hunter happens upon Griselda, the home’s owner, in dark thick sunglasses, before being invited in for a tour of the home’s history; seeking common ground between the grief of the young woman’s father and Griselda’s husband, the happenstance encounter skates around the social code. Symbolic and fairytale-esque, the tour concludes staring into the pond and denoting the beautiful eyes her husband once stared into—before she tore them out. The dark imagery of thousands of eyes reflected off a singular eyeless face parallels The Substance, where maiden and crone archetypes—note that the mother is absent—beget body from body, while clawing out the eyes themselves calls back to the Brothers Grimm.
“The Night of Broken Guitars” calls upon the common experience of losing a parent in the grocery store, told from the perspective of the adult engaging in conversation about youthful skincare as her daughters wander off. An inverse of the cliché of a bull in the china shop, the storekeeper remarks on the mother’s youthful skin until, like a taut wire, he snaps at the girls playing with the guitars, melting them into a puddle of public distress. Readers of Kelly Link’s The Book of Love will draw parallels to the guitar’s place as a catalyst to the emotional engine of the story.
Hospitals, a mainstay of liminal space in popular culture and literature, feature a sense of religion in “The Rest Pavilion,” where a patient preparing to die ends up ready to live, but remains distraught at abandoning “The Rest Pavilion.” Angelina’s devotion to the pavilion as a passerby possesses the youthful innocence of a child wearing each shirt in their closet so one does not feel left out—who remembers the rest pavilion? Aging, with a daughter out of the home, the caretaking aspects of Angelina’s persona precede her hospital stay, which differentiates this story from Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Tender” where the inhabitant physically cares for the liminal space.
The collection’s heartbeat, like Poe’s “Telltale Heart,” beats from the novel’s floorboards nestled towards the middle with “Behind the Gate.” An aunt and a niece under one grandmother’s roof compete for the affections of the same man, the elder by day, the younger at night. The sly sleeping draughts, the twists and turns of each character believing they will rid themselves of the other, parallels a micro version of Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith.
All in all, Dávila’s collection holds varied narrative styles, from first to third, united by the common thread of a gothic setting and hauntings, whether death holds a house in “The Rest Pavilion” or grief steals sight in “Griselda.” While each story is complete on its own, “Behind the Gate,” holding the titular theme of voicelessness against a scheme of your own making and accepting the consequences of obsession, could unite the collection on a stronger end note as the concluding story.
FICTION/SHORT STORIES
Behind the Gate & Other Stories
By Amparo Dávila
New Directions Publishing Company
Published November 3, 2026
