Books › Her Body and Other Parties
Her Body and Other Parties
Stories
280 pages
A surreal, razor-sharp fever dream that maps the violence and desire inscribed upon women's bodies.
What it feels like
Reading this collection feels like stepping into a fever dream where the boundaries between the mundane and the monstrous dissolve. The pacing is brisk and propulsive, pulling you through narratives that are as deeply unsettling as they are intoxicatingly sensual. The prose is razor-sharp and lyrical, wrapping visceral body horror in the velvet cloak of dark fairy tales and urban legends. It is an unapologetic, claustrophobic experience that sits heavy in your chest, radiating a mood of eerie dread laced with dark, biting humor. This is a book for those who crave queer surrealism and feminist horror, delighting readers who want to explore the female body not just as a battleground of systemic violence, but as a site of defiant, untamed desire.
- Mood
- unsettling
- feverish
- sensual
- eerie
- claustrophobic
- Tone
- provocative
- darkly humorous
- unapologetic
- surreal
- intimate
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- bodily autonomy · queer desire · the monstrous feminine · systemic violence · female embodiment
- The writing
- Lyrical, razor-sharp, and unapologetically visceral, blending the cadence of dark fairy tales with modern, gritty realism.
- The arc
- Plunges the reader into a disorienting, visceral nightmare before surfacing with a lingering sense of defiant, bruised survival.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave feminist horror, queer surrealism, and stories that treat the female body as a haunted house.
Content notes
- body horror
- sexual violence
- domestic abuse
- pandemic/plague
- psychological manipulation
About the book
In this electric and provocative debut, Carmen Maria Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella 'Especially Heinous,' Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show naively assumeded had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgangers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes.
Description from Open Library.
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