Gothic literature is most often associated with its haunted spaces: the rotting castles, strange nocturnal noises in the next room, the draft of cold air that seems to come from nowhere. Like Shirley Jackson or Angela Carter before her, Machado pulls from the deep well of Gothic feminism, but in an age where those anxieties can be laid out more bluntly. These stories live in that dark zone increasingly shared by realist fiction and horror: of sexuality, queerness, and alienation, of identity and its discontents. Her debut collection reflects this best-of-both-worlds synthesis, combining the daring, high-wire prose of a stylist with the satisfying pulpiness of a horror writer. Machado is a graduate of both the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Workshop, two premier institutions in the realist and speculative writing traditions. That’s a fitting liminality for a collection preoccupied with things and forces that powerfully exist, but in another sense, don’t-a set of stories that masterfully refit domestic horror and its predecessor, the Gothic, for an age fraught with unreality.
As recognition goes, it’s entirely deserved and just a little eerie, since the collection isn’t actually published until October 3. Some of them with their own books the major and minor arcana of our little religion.Last Friday, Carmen Maria Machado’s astonishing short story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, was long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award. In its pages is our own liturgical calendar: Saint Clementine and All Wayfarers Saints Lorena Hickok and Eleanor Roosevelt, observed in the summer with blueberries to symbolize the sapphire ring the Vigil of Saint Juliette, complete with mints and dark chocolate Feast of the Poets, during which Mary Oliver is recited over beds of lettuce, Kay Ryan over a dish of vinegar and oil, Audre Lorde over cucumbers, Elizabeth Bishop over some carrots The Exaltation of Patricia Highsmith, celebrated with escargots boiling in butter and garlic and cliffhangers recited by an autumn fire the Ascension of Frida Khalo with self-portraits and costumes the Presentation of Shirley Jackson, a winter holiday started at dawn and ended at dusk with a gambling game played with lost milk teeth and stones.
Next to it, an old podium that once held a Bible, on which we have repurposed an old chemistry handbook as the Book of Lilith. “Beyond the table, there is an altar, with candles lit for Billie Holiday and Willa Carter and Hypatia and Patsy Cline.
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