SOURCE: "Police State Paranoia," in Christian Science Monitor, July 9, 1979, p. 19.

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...