A slim, unsettling collection from Peirene Press.

Hotschnig is an Austrian writer often placed near Kafka, not because the stories are full of grand bureaucratic nightmares, but because ordinary life keeps developing trapdoors: a stranger waiting in an empty flat, a neighbour observed too closely, intimacy turning into surveillance, curiosity becoming contamination.

These are stories of looking, trespass, unease and projection — people drawn into other people’s lives until the line between witness and participant starts to rot. Hotschnig’s sentences are clean and controlled, which makes the strangeness worse. Nothing announces itself as horror, exactly; it just becomes difficult to leave the room.

Peirene Press paperback. Very good condition with light shelf wear.