Carmen Maria Machado

Machado's memoir is a compelling and imaginative telling of a partnership with an abusive lesbian lover. Grad students, they commute between Bloomington IN where the Dream House is and the narrator's school in Iowa City. As the gas lighting and verbal threats escalate, Machado frankly describes her victim stance and inability to extricate herself. Her studies would have been insupportable without good friends. "When you try to talk about the Dream House afterward, some people listen, others politely nod while slowly closing the door behind their eyes; you might as well be a proselytizing Jehovah's Witness or an encyclopedia peddler." She footnotes the short chapters with an index to Motifs in Folk Literature referencing the taboos surfacing in their dissension and sociological notes on queer domestic abuse. Her honesty and the poetry of her writing kept me rapt.… (mere)

Set in a dying Pennsylvania coal town where a fire burns below ground, this horror story follows two queer teens who wake up in a movie theater, not remembering the past two hours. Anyone with experience of Machado and/or the news will likely figure out the gist, though not its fantastic/horror elements, which are linked to the skinned men and deer-woman that stalk the woods around town, and to the existence of sinkhole women (body horror). If Stephen King does horror well because his answer to “Why do bad things happen?” is “because they can,” Machado’s horror comes from giving the same answer to “Why do people do bad things?”… (mere)

I have actually quite ambivalent feelings about this book, but there's parts that I think are gonna stick with me for quite a while. It's very much a book of ghosts, of isolated (alienated?) women, a book that on paper I'd adore, but something about the execution here didn't always quite click for me. I liked, in some way or another, almost all the stories, but "The Husband Stitch" left me cold.
Also, it is weird/interesting/affirming to read the work of someone who, I think, has an unusually similar frame of reference, literarily at least, to my own. Like, gay Shirley Jackson fans with feelings about being fat girls unite.… (mere)