Silvina Ocampo's stories often evoke a distressing fictional world: children frequently witness, commit, or suffer acts of violence; death and murder occur with startling regularity; self-mutilation and rivalry abound; vengeance outstrips offense; and a sinister atmosphere hovers over even those stories that avoid direct engagement with cruelty. Beginning with Mario A. Lancelotti's 1962 review of Ocampo's fourth short story collection, Las invitadas, references to the stories’ cruelty have become de rigueur in Ocampo criticism, yet they are often accompanied by a certain uneasiness or bent toward justification. Jorge Luis Borges declared his perplexity before Ocampo's “strange taste for a certain kind of innocent and oblique cruelty,” which he explained as “the astonished interest that evil inspires in a noble soul” (Ocampo, Leopoldina's Dream 2). This pronouncement possesses the ring of authority we expect from Borges, but the reference to “innocence” and a “noble soul” also betrays a certain patronizing and dismissive stance rather than serious consideration of the role of cruelty in Ocampo's fiction. Even Ocampo herself displayed a certain ambivalence regarding cruelty in her fiction. At times she seemed to take pride in the sharp edges of her tales, and she expressed her delight in “El vestido de terciopelo” [The velvet dress] which she describes as “un cuento muy cruel” (Ulla, Encuentros 72) [a very cruel story]. But she also responded negatively to critics’ tendency to fixate on cruelty: “me parece que es un poco exagerado decir que [los cuentos] son crueles” (48) [I think it is a bit exaggerated to say that the stories are cruel]. At one point she argued that cruelty was only relevant to a handful of stories and distanced herself from these “cuentos de crueldad” which she claimed were “totalmente distintos del resto” (72, 91) [the stories of cruelty are completely different from the rest]. Ocampo retracted this remark a moment later, and the shift in the conversation suggests that what bothered her was less the presence of cruelty in her fiction than the degree to which it hampered positive critical attention. In part, this frustration stemmed from Ocampo's belief that negative reactions to the cruelty of her stories had prevented her from receiving Argentina's Premio Nacional for fiction (92).