Her Body and Other Parties

If you want horror that feels genuinely contemporary, Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection is one of the most inventive books the genre has produced in years. A finalist for the National Book Award, it blends horror with fairy tales, science fiction, and erotica in stories that refuse to stay in any single genre.

Why Start Here

Machado writes about women’s bodies, desires, and fears with a frankness that makes the horror feel personal and urgent. Her stories take familiar forms, a ghost story, an epidemic narrative, a retelling of “The Green Ribbon,” and twist them into something unsettling and new. The collection’s most famous story, “The Husband Stitch,” recasts a well-known urban legend as a meditation on the ways women’s bodies are controlled and consumed.

What makes these stories work as horror is Machado’s understanding that the uncanny lives in the gap between the familiar and the strange. Her prose is lush and precise, and she has a gift for images that lodge in your mind: a woman who catalogs every sexual partner she has ever had, a dress shop that might be a portal to another dimension, a plague that makes women slowly fade away.

What to Expect

Eight stories that range from a few pages to novella length. The tone shifts between darkly funny, deeply unsettling, and genuinely moving. Machado draws from folklore, pop culture, and literary tradition with equal ease. Readers who enjoy authors like Kelly Link or Angela Carter will find a kindred spirit here. At 245 pages, the collection moves quickly, though individual stories reward rereading.