Book Review: Seven Empty Houses

Seven Empty Houses by Samanta Schweblin
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Publication Date: October 18, 2022
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Publisher’s Description:

The seven houses in these seven stories are strange. A person is missing, or a truth, or memory; some rooms are enticing, some unmoored, others empty. But in Samanta Schweblin’s tense, visionary tales, something always creeps back inside: a ghost, a fight, trespassers, a list of things to do before you die, a child’s first encounter with darkness or the fallibility of parents.

In each story, twists and turns will unnerve and surprise: Schweblin never takes the expected path and instead digs under the skin, revealing surreal truths about our sense of home, of belonging, and of the fragility of our connections with others. This is a masterwork from one of our most brilliant modern writers.

Seven Empty Houses is a short story collection. It was first published in Spanish in 2015. Short story collections are hard to review because most of the time, some stories are better than others. That’s the case here.

These stories are bizarre, in a disturbing way. In one of them, the grandparents are running around in the backyard naked, for reasons never made clear. In another, a mother makes her adult child drive her around to different houses that she breaks into just to have a look around and take a trinket or two.

Most of the stories were too unsettling for me but I did like the longest one in the collection, which follows the decline of a woman with dementia. I felt like the author did a great job getting inside the woman’s head and portraying her thoughts as she gets more and more confused.

This was my May book club pick. It made for a lively discussion because we all had different interpretations of what the stories meant. One thing we agreed on is that they were all weird!