“Especially Heinous” will pique the interest of any fan of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit the story is told through fictive summaries of the police procedural’s first twelve seasons, but in Machado’s ghostly version, Detectives Benson and Stabler must grapple with doppelgangers, girls-with-bells-for-eyes, and a city with a real heartbeat. In each of these stories, we encounter new iterations of the female body that are at once otherworldly and recognizable.Ī number of Machado’s stories also exemplify a formal inventiveness that adds to their strange appeal. After surviving a sexual assault, a woman cannot watch pornography without hearing the despondent, pleading thoughts of the actors on screen. A writer attends a much-anticipated artist residency, only to be haunted by mysterious illness and the traumatic memory of a childhood summer. Women with faded bodies dwell inside prom dresses. These are weird, sexy, scary tales that thrum at the electrifying junction of fear and desire. In these eight stories, Machado bulldozes the barriers between sci-fi, fantasy, literary fiction, horror, and erotica, and makes us wonder how we ever could have dreamed of separating them. It is a book that pushes back: against literary conventions, against the stigma and silence surrounding queer sensuality. In the opening story of Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection, the narrator, stealing into the woods to have sex with her boyfriend, offers the following reflection: “I have heard all of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.” “Unafraid” is an apt descriptor of Her Body and Other Parties, released yesterday from Graywolf Press. The primary antagonist and motivator within this story is that, in the background of every encounter, there is the beginning, spreading, and devastation of an epidemic occurring across the U.S.Microreview: Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties In this way, the encounters maintain an arc to them which progresses toward a peak of sexuality and then descends toward a plateau of intimacy. Toward the tail-end of the story, the encounters become less directly sexual and more physically intimate-kissing and straddling as opposed to penetration and coming.
Starting with the fourth encounter the items entail relationships or acts of sex between the narrator and other men, women-at times individually, at times in small groups. The first three encounters detailed are childhood or teenage moments of sexuality and sexual expression. Inventory is a story in 20-parts detailing sexual encounters between the unnamed, first-person female narrator and a myriad of lovers.
0 kommentar(er)
