Another day, another short story collection to pass the time. Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties is a genre-blending selection of tales that will both titillate and terrify you. Mixing science fiction and horror with literary fiction with a heavy smattering of some sexually explicit details, this collection is full of LGBTQ+ representation and unique worlds where emotion is high, life is uncertain, and desire rules all.

As noted on Goodreads (forgive me for not having a better brief), Her Body and Other Parties blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabula. This electric and provocative debut bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.

A wife refuses her husband’s entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store’s prom dresses. One woman’s surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And the bravura novella Especially Heinous reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naively assumed had shown it all.

Nearly every genre seems to be touched upon with these works, but it doesn’t feel too much or confusing in the grand scheme of things. The science fiction world building does not negate or cancel out the very raw, human emotion spread across all the stories, just as the sexual content does not deter from the action-based and character-led plots. If you are not expecting explicit detail when picking up this book, it will come as a shock, but once you pass that and see the stories for their full depth you will understand the relevance of these scenes. This comes from a reader who generally doesn’t like or wants to read sexually explicit scenes in books – somethings the stories need them to flesh out the meaning.

I have not come across something like this before, and I am glad to have added it to my TBR list when it came up in a recommendations post. My favourite short story in the collection is The Resident – I love the atmosphere and the setting, how these elements feed into each other and the rest of the book, how the characters act and react, and the deeper and darker themes of the piece. Overall, I love the science fiction aspects and horror details of the stories. It gives the whole collection a dark fairytale vibe and gives this contemporary literary fiction collection some otherworldliness to it that makes it stand out. I would recommend this to adult readers, especially those who like horror or science fiction elements.