![]() ![]() In painful, discursive style, with short, densely packed chapters (frequently so brief they read like vignettes), Machado deconstructs the dream house (alternately a fairy-tale castle, or a prison, but never a home) both as the setting in which the relationship took place and as the blood and bones of the relationship itself. ![]() ![]() Instead of a novel, as traditionally anticipated in the wake of a short fiction debut, she has written In the Dream House, a memoir of a tormented, abusive relationship she experienced with a woman, from electrifying first meeting to the shock of discovery that the love object was not all they first appeared to be. Machado’s follow-up is a different beast – one that is just as untamed, original and brilliantly unclassifiable. Through creating often garishly uncomfortable scenarios in prose that was never less than elegant, Machado quickly achieved cult status – as well as being a finalist for several major literary prizes. They pushed at political and psychological boundaries, acknowledging a debt not only to conventional narrative structure but also to fan fiction and urban myth. Provocative, sensual and gender- and genre-defying, with strong elements of science fiction and gothic horror, its eight fabular tales smouldered defiantly. Carmen Maria Machado was hailed as a modern-day Angela Carter on the publication of her first collection of stories, Her Body and Other Parties, in 2017. ![]()
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