Introduction

This collection is Quiroga's masterpiece, and its title sums up the three great themes of his world. In 'The Feather Pillow' the newly married Alicia wastes away in a cold white house, growing anaemic until she dies; when the maid strips the bed, she finds inside the feather pillow a monstrous creature swollen like a ball with blood. In 'The Decapitated Chicken' a couple's four sons are all idiots, and their one healthy little daughter is killed in the kitchen by her four brothers, who cut her throat in imitation of the maid killing a chicken. 'Drifting' follows a man bitten by a snake in the jungle as he paddles his canoe alone down the Paraná in search of help; as the venom spreads through his body he remembers the past in a delirium and slowly dies in the boat. Here too are famous stories of sunstroke, of dogs, of barbed wire and a bull, and of labourers in the jungle. Deeply influenced by Poe and Kipling, Quiroga writes with a cold, spare hand, building suffocating tension and terror within a few pages.