Her Body and Other Parties

Starred review from August 7, 2017
Machado creates eerie, inventive worlds shimmering with supernatural swerves in this engrossing debut collection. Her stories make strikingly feminist moves by combining elements of horror and speculative fiction with women’s everyday crises. Machado builds entire interior lives through sparse and minor details, turning even litanies of refrigerator contents and free-association on the coming of autumn into memorable meditations on identity and female disempowerment. Queerness permeates these tales, shaping the women and their problems, with a recurring focus on the inherent strangeness of female bodies. These bodies face an epidemic of inexplicable evaporation (“Real Women Have Bodies”), linger as distorted masses beyond weight-loss surgery (“Eight Bites”), or gain the ability to hear the thoughts of actors in porn (“Difficult at Parties”). “The Husband Stitch” makes explicit the hidden sexuality of creepy urban legends. In “Especially Heinous,” Machado rewrites 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, riffing on the titles as she imagines Benson haunted by victims, Stabler beset by domestic drama, and both competing with more efficient doppelgangers. Machado’s slightly slanted world echoes our own in ways that will entertain, challenge, and move readers.

Starred review from October 1, 2017
Women and their bodies, and the violence done to them, both by themselves and others, occupy the center of Machado's inventive, sensual, and eerie debut horror collection. These stories use situations at once familiar and completely strange to reveal what it is like to inhabit the female body. We see, for example, a woman listing an inventory of her sexual encounters as humanity is being destroyed by a plague; a shop clerk who realizes that the dresses she is selling absorb the women who wear them; and a woman dealing with a surprise side effect after her gastric-bypass surgery. In the most ambitious of the lot, Especially Heinous, all 12 seasons of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit are reimagined as a single and coherent, if satisfyingly creepy and surreal, tale. The writing is always lyrical, the narration refreshingly direct, and the sex abundant, and although the supernatural elements are not overt, every story is terrifying. These weird tales present a slightly askew version of the world as we know it and force us, no matter our gender, to reconsider our current life choices and relationships. Readers of authors as varied as Roxane Gay, Jeff VanderMeer, and Karen Russell will find much to enjoy here.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

Starred review from July 1, 2017
Machado's debut collection brings together eight stories that showcase her fluency in the bizarre, magical, and sharply frightening depths of the imagination.Each of the stories in this collection has, at its center, a strange and surprising idea that communicates, in a shockingly visceral way, the experience of living inside a woman's body. In "The Husband Stitch," Machado turns the well-known horror story about a girl who wears a green ribbon around her neck inside out, transforming the worn childhood nightmare into a blistering exploration of female desire and the insidious entitlement that society claims over the female body. "Especially Heinous" turns 12 seasons of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit into a disorienting, lonely, and oddly hopeful crime procedural crammed with ghosts and doppelgangers. "Difficult at Parties" depicts a woman trying to recover from a sexual assault. She watches porn in the hope that it will help her reconnect with her boyfriend and discovers that she can somehow hear the thoughts of the actors on the screen. Women fade out of their physical bodies and get incorporated into prom dresses. They get gastric bypass surgery, suffer epidemics, have children, go to artist residencies. They have a lot of sex. The fierceness and abundance of sex and desire in these stories, the way emotion is inextricably connected with the concerns of the body, makes even the most outlandish imaginings strangely familiar. Machado writes with furious grace. She plays with form and expectation in ways that are both funny and elegant but never obscure. "If you are reading this story out loud," one story suggests, "give a paring knife to the listeners and ask them to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb." With Machado's skill, this feels not like a quirk or a flourish but like a perfectly appropriate direction. An exceptional and pungently inventive first book.

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Starred review from October 1, 2017

DEBUT Eight unearthly and imaginative stories comprise this debut story collection. "Especially Heinous" stands out as a peculiar and enchanting retelling of episodes from the TV series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU). With its malevolent doppelgangers mimicking both lead characters, while a host of girls-with-bells-for-eyes haunt the increasingly unhinged detective Olivia, this novella ensures that its readers will never watch reruns of SVU without drawing upon Machado's novella as a frame of reference. Collectively, the stories reflect the commonplace reality wherein women's bodies are not their own. Two pieces in particular make this grim connection. In "The Husband Stitch," Machado puts her own spin on an urban legend wherein a young wife struggles against her husband's persistent attempts to remove a green ribbon from her neck. In "Real Women Have Bodies," women have slowly begun to disappear, seemingly without widespread alarm. VERDICT Including stories previously published in such journals as Granta and The New Yorker, this brilliant debut compilation showcases a fresh literary voice. Machado's originality and emotional acumen make her a match for Karen Russell or Kelly Link. Highly recommended.--Faye Chadwell, Oregon State Univ., Corvallis

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