Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado; Graywolf Press, $16
Lesbian author Carmen Maria Machado's debut story collection "Her Body and Other Parties" is one of those masterpieces that come preloaded with their own stockpile of accolades. Shortlisted for the National Book Award for fiction and a $50,000 Kirkus Prize nominee, the collection's eight original tales feature women on the verge of the catastrophic, the bizarre, and the truly terrifying.
Grotesqueries abound, along with plenty of literary food for thought. Each allegory is an adult fairy tale starring wild women who fall somewhere on the spectrum of the bold and the brazen, and most are unapologetically queer and gorgeously feminine, even in the face of the plague found in the story "Inventory." It's a catastrophic virus that promises to engulf the Earth and destroy every living thing on it, thinks the narrator, one of the last survivors fleeing for a safe haven that cannot be found, since "the world will continue to turn, even with no people on it."
The opening story, "The Husband Stitch," is a stunner in the form of a curious, unnerving narrative told from the perspective of a secretive woman who has spent her life with a mysterious green ribbon tied around her neck. Her doting husband finally insists she remove it, and she does. The decorative choker ends up hiding a monstrous secret.
Elsewhere in the collection, women attempt to soothe the psychological scars of sexual abuse through the viewing of porn. In "Difficult at Parties," the main character can somehow hear the thoughts of the actors performing in those films. The girls populating "Real Women Have Bodies" become liquefied and merge into the seams of prom dresses like silly putty, while the gastric bypass surgery that promises to metamorphosize the woman in "Eight Bites" only distorts and demonizes. The novella-length "Especially Heinous" is an ingenious reimagining of 12 seasons of Law & Order: SVU into a multilayered story all on its own.
Absorbing and addictive, spooky and sensually Sapphic, this treasure chest of stories will delight readers of any gender or persuasion.