Ally’s Reviews > Her Body and Other Parties: Stories > Status Update

"The Resident" - The twist that this is all an artist's statement is kind of funny? The big reveal of gay torture I didn't find satisfying. Some great moments where the piece leans into the horror of derealization, but it doesn't hang there long. Again some good stuff but long for the material. (The text here suggests possibly the bagginess is intentional, to create disorientation?)

"Real Women Have Bodies" - I really liked parts of this one about a disease where women become insubstantial and then attach to beautiful things... still under-baked and baggy though! We get closest so far to having realized characters in this one: both the narrator and the love interest remain blank-slate but there's a boss and a co-worker that start to feel like more than an empty vessel or a stereotype.

“Especially Heinous” - writing in response to the episode titles of the first 12 seasons of SVU is a neat formal device, but, again, it doesn’t really go anywhere and by somewhere in the middle, the author is bored of it. The virtuosity of a puzzle stunt lies in making the thing work!

"Mothers" - the premise here (pretend child of a couple takes on a greater reality to the abused partner after the breakup) has potential, but we learn all of it in the first page or so and there's no real development.

"Inventory" - Liked the trick on this one, a list of encounters is a nice spin on the diary short story. I love the diary form for the degree of elision it allows, which here emphasizes the loneliness and scale of the story by leaving most of it out. A nice rhyme with the experience of a ONS / brief love as in most of these snippets, that can carry a lot of meaning while you only know a tiny part of the other.

"The Husband Stitch" - lots of lovely sentences, could probably have been a quarter the length with the same impact. The "if you are reading this aloud" interludes were a nice trick repeated too often; the other-horror-stories were almost all unnecessary and many were dull, we needed maybe one or two in the beginning. The central conceit is both obvious and makes no sense, which maybe just makes it horror?