Book Review: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Genre: Literary Fiction / Horror / Speculative Short Stories
Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is a genre-defying masterpiece that grips you by the throat and whispers secrets that feel both ancient and unsettlingly modern. With elements of horror, fantasy, psychological realism, and biting satire, Machado’s debut short story collection explores the visceral realities of living in a female body—with all its pleasures, threats, and surreal transformations.
Each story is a world of its own: darkly sensual, razor-sharp, and eerily familiar. The opening tale, The Husband Stitch, reimagines a ghost story with devastating emotional depth, layering in folklore and urban legend with a woman’s slow erosion of autonomy. Especially Heinous, perhaps the most polarizing entry, is a fever-dream reworking of every Law & Order: SVU episode—disturbing, hilarious, and painfully smart in its commentary on violence and voyeurism.
Machado doesn’t just blur genre lines—she obliterates them. Her stories are filled with queer desire, spectral trauma, body horror, and feminist rage, told in prose that’s lush, rhythmic, and hauntingly poetic. It’s the kind of writing that lingers long after the book is closed—aching, beautiful, and brutal.
This collection isn’t meant to comfort—it’s meant to unsettle, to illuminate, to demand that you look again and see what’s been hiding beneath the surface all along. Her Body and Other Parties is a bold, unflinching examination of how stories shape us—and how women’s stories are too often ignored, twisted, or erased.
Rating: 5/5
If you enjoy Margaret Atwood’s speculative edge, Shirley Jackson’s eerie restraint, or Angela Carter’s feminist fairy tales, Machado will feel like a revelation. Bold, queer, and unrelenting—this is a modern classic in the making.