Recommendations
Books Like Her Body and Other Parties
Best books to read after Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Her Body and Other Parties bends horror and fantasy into shape around women's bodies and their dangers. These 8 books share its use of genre as a feminist tool, its refusal to make women's experience comfortable, and its formal invention in the service of subjects that realism can't fully reach.
- 1Buy
In the Dream House
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's 2019 memoir applies the same genre toolkit as Her Body and Other Parties — the haunted house, the choose-your-own-adventure, the fairy tale — to autobiography, turning the memoir of an abusive relationship into a formally inventive work as disturbing as any of the stories in the collection.
- 2Buy
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1962 novel about two sisters living in isolation after most of their family has been poisoned is the great predecessor to Machado's work in American female gothic — strange, funny, and deeply unsettling, it uses the Gothic mode to examine social exclusion and the violence done to women who refuse to conform.
- 3Buy
The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1959 horror novel about a haunted house and the four people who investigate it is the foundational text of American psychological horror fiction and the direct ancestor of the domestic horror in Machado's work, particularly her use of the haunted space as an externalization of female psychological experience.
- 4Buy
Get in Trouble
by Kelly Link
Link's 2015 story collection — nine stories of uncanny fantasy and horror featuring characters in trouble with the supernatural — is the closest formal and tonal parallel to Her Body and Other Parties in contemporary American genre fiction: inventive, feminist, and genuinely strange, with the same taste for the intersection of the domestic and the horrifying.
- 5Buy
Florida
by Lauren Groff
Groff's 2018 story collection — eleven stories set mostly in Florida, all saturated with heat, dread, and ecological threat — uses the short story form to approach female interiority and danger with the same formal intensity as Her Body and Other Parties, though in a realist mode; a natural companion from the literary fiction side of Machado's work.
- 6Buy
The Bloody Chamber
by Angela Carter
Carter's 1979 collection of feminist fairy tale retellings — including 'The Bloody Chamber,' a retelling of Bluebeard, and 'The Company of Wolves,' a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood — is the foundational text of the feminist horror/fairy tale hybrid that Machado practices in 'The Husband Stitch' and throughout Her Body and Other Parties.
- 7Buy
Passing
by Nella Larsen
Larsen's 1929 novella about two Black women — one passing as white, one not — uses Gothic undercurrents (obsession, doubling, the uncanny) to approach the horror of racial and gender constraint, and is a foundational text in the tradition of American women's horror that Machado's work extends and transforms.
- 8Buy
Practical Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Hoffman's 1995 novel about two sisters descended from a long line of witches is a lighter entry point to the domestic female supernatural that runs through Her Body and Other Parties — women's power as something suspected and feared, domesticity as a space that both contains and threatens, the body as a site of magic and danger.
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