Dentro da noite

A man riding a suburban train confesses that the sight of his fiancée’s bare arms awakened an urge to pierce them with pins. It is only the first secret the night will disclose.

Across eighteen stories, João do Rio moves through gambling rooms, drawing rooms, ships, hotels, carnival crowds, hospitals, churches, and streets after dark. A political prisoner is punished with silence; a mask turns revelry into horror; an epidemic makes every face suspect; fashionable observers pursue sensations until curiosity becomes complicity. French phrases, nervous laughter, perfume, disease, money, performance, and desire pass continually between the elegant city and the people it prefers not to acknowledge.

The collection makes Rio glitter and rot at once. Its monsters rarely need the supernatural; appetite and spectatorship are enough.