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I’m reluctant to admit this but it’s often easier for me to write about a book I hated rather than a book I loved It’s less exhausting, it gives me an opportunity to say something sharp, if not mean; it certainly takes less time – you can dismiss something in one short, swift action If I write about a book with affection I worry I’m, consciously or unconsciously, revealing something about myself – that I have good taste or bad taste, troubling obsessions, a sympathy towards those who are undeserving of it, that I’m insensitive or incapable of intellectual thought – and I have no interest in revealing anything about myself But it’s difficult to write coldly, in the precise language of criticism, about a book that provokes a personal, emotional response And Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, although admirably stylish and original, does prompt feeling above all else   In these eight stories, all written from a female perspective, all invoking supernatural elements with obvious antecedents in Angela Carter and Shirley Jackson, Machado roams a landscape at once familiar and brutally weird Here are girls: girls who have become mothers too soon and are doubtful of their abilities in ‘Mothers’; girls with dead-end jobs, and student loan debt, fighting against their limited options and wondering, at the same time, why they should bother in ‘Real Women Have Bodies’ And women: a wife in the suburban gothic, sexually charged ‘The Husband Stitch’; a mother with damaging body issues choosing to recourse to surgery in ‘Eight Bites’ In ‘The Resident’, so deeply indebted to Jackson that you can practically hear the windows of her Hill House rattle, a writer navigates her ‘dying profession’ in an isolated lake residency, while recalling adolescent trauma from that holy American tradition, the Girl Scouts The settings are strange, if not lethal, but the women make immediate sense to me   Thematically, there is an exploration of erotic desire, particularly queer desire, a wariness of home, or what takes place in the home, and a true understanding of the landscapes of the lost: