This spring, Imagine Television optioned her work, with Gina Welch, a writer on Feud and The Terror, pitching it around as an anthology series, a sort of feminist Black Mirror. “A life story is multi-genre, and in the course of a day your love story might turn into a horror story, or vice versa.” Machado’s knack for capturing the mundane horrors of female existence has brought her attention - from the New York Times, which included her in a feature on literature’s “ New Vanguard,” praising her depictions of “everyday” misogyny, and from dozens of Hollywood producers. “The way she arcs so gracefully from gothic romance to comedy to horror, feels true to me of how we live our lives,” the author Karen Russell, a fan, told me in an email. It is impossible to know how Machado’s stories would have been received in another era, but in this one, they have reverberated among readers with the prophetic force of a soothsayer’s divinations. In Machado’s telling, the husband is “not a bad man.” It’s a case of murder by microaggression - a thoughtless gesture with devastating consequences. Anyone who grew up with a copy of Alvin Schwartz’s 1984 collection of scary children’s tales, In A Dark, Dark Room and Other Scary Stories, will recognize the kicker of “The Husband Stitch”: a woman’s head falls off when her husband unties the green ribbon around her neck. In another, a woman who gets bariatric surgery is haunted by the ghost of what the doctor cuts away. In one, an epidemic turns women invisible, and nobody cares. As the world began to pay attention to women’s stories of abuse, her queer, liminal stories held a flickering candle to the subtle forms of cruelty that continue to go undiscussed. Carmen Maria Machado’s critically acclaimed debut collection of short stories, Her Body and Other Parties, was published just two days before news broke that Harvey Weinstein had been preying on Hollywood starlets for decades and getting away with it.
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