Maybe it’s because I haven’t seen a single episode of SVU, but I did not understand what these snippets were doing at all. I’m thinking most specifically of Especially Heinous, which was the longest one!!! It puts together little snippet summaries of each Law & Order: SVU episode, but in a really weird, supernatural/horror way. I didn’t mind them.īut then there were stories that were just out there…like really abstract/absurdist. Stories like The Husband Stitch (which is a re-telling of the Green Ribbon short story) and Eight Bites were pretty straightforward and I understood the premise. There were maybe two or three where I knew what was going on, I understood it, and maybe I didn’t hate them, but there was no real love there. Maybe it’s because horror/creepy is not my favorite genre, but most of these stories were just so weird to me. That being said, I really didn’t care for this book of short stories. I’ve loved quite a few, but I’ve also hated quite a few, and there hasn’t been one compilation or book of short stories by any author where I’ve loved the majority. I want to first start by saying that I’m on the fence about short stories. And in the bravura novella Especially Heinous, Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.Ī wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. This collection has been nominated for numerous awards and was awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction (2018).
Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado is a collection of short stories, many of which contain an air of horror, but all of which have a feminist thread through them.
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