Estronho e esquésito

This first incursion into classic Brazilian short stories of horror and unease brings together texts where the unsettling does not rely on overt supernatural elements, but on what is intimate, morally unstable, and essentially human. Do not expect obvious monsters or cheap scares here. What is offered are mirrors — and not all of them return a pleasant image.

Classic Brazilian horror rarely resorts to pure spectacle. Even so, when it decides to touch upon the macabre, it does so with precision and lasting unease. The short stories gathered in this second incursion do not merely seek to unsettle: they disturb and deform. There are no cheap scares here. There is obsession, the grotesque, death, and a persistent feeling that something has been crossed — and shouldn't have been.

As with The Crooked Moor ─which we saw in the previous article of this series─, this is a story that crossed borders, was reshaped in contact with local daily life, and ended up recorded as a folk tale. Here, the setting is Brazilian, the characters are recognizable, but the skeleton of the narrative belongs to a much older repertoire.

The short stories collected in this part explore the grotesque in its different faces: submission to the unacceptable, the excess that degrades, and the everyday brutality that becomes normalized. These are not quick scares or cheap effects. The unease arises from insistence, repetition, and the feeling that something has been deformed —inside and out.

After moving through the moral horror of Machado, the urban decadentism of João do Rio, and the grotesque obsessions of the late 19th century, we come to Bernardo Guimarães — an author whom many insist on reducing to romantic regionalism, but who possesses much darker veins than what usually appears in textbooks.

The tale The Young Woman and the Candle belongs to a recurrent category of Luso-Brazilian folklore: cautionary narratives primarily directed at youth, especially young women, in which disobedience to familial advice results in direct contact with the supernatural. In these stories, certain domestic spaces take on a symbolic function.