[Below, Long finds Strange Things Happen Here "stranger than strange," noting that fear and paranoia permeate the collection.]

Strange Things Happen Here, a collection of 22 severely brief stories and a nouvelle by the gifted Argentinean writer Luisa Valenzuela, is stranger than strange. One of the early stories, "The Best Shod," hardly longer than a page, might serve as an example. It recounts the good fortune of beggars in a South American city who are able to find a plentiful plunder—in the shoes of corpses, hidden in vacant lots, sewers, and thickets. The corpses often have bullet holes or have been burned in the course of being tortured by electric cattle prods. The misfortune of these victims of political oppression provides a bountiful harvest.

Valenzuela's landscapes are insistently baroque. Her characters are dehumanized by police-state conditions, under which citizens are encouraged to inform on one another, and innocent people are taken away in the night by the police, or wait to be. Fear permeates her stories, in which the paranoid suspicions of the authorities become everyone's paranoia, and the world seems cut adrift from its moorings of sanity. The bizarre nature of the "real" can be seen at every level of the society Valenzuela depicts. In the title story, two urban cast-abouts find a briefcase in a café and snatch it as an unexpected prize, but are then paralyzed with the fear of what might be in it—counterfeit money or, more likely, a terrorist's bomb. How could they explain to the police if they were found with it?

That night, after returning the briefcase, unopened, to the café, one of them has a dream in which a bomb explodes; but as he awakens he cannot tell if the explosion he has heard is real or part of his dream.