Fairy Tales About the Fears Within

She has been decapitated twice, had her right arm sawed off once and been smeared with paint too many times to count. No public monument has faced such steady abuse as the statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid perched on a large rock in a Copenhagen harbor. Among her most faithful assailants have been feminist groups protesting her as “a symbol of hostility to women.” In 2006, they attached a dildo to her hand, in honor of International Women’s Day.

There might be no better illustration of the lasting, unsettling power of fairy tales. Despite efforts to sanitize them or give them a feminist slant, a whiff of something disreputable lingers, something slightly kinky. “Children know something they can’t tell,” Djuna Barnes wrote in “Nightwood.” “They like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!”

“Her Body and Other Parties,” by Carmen Maria Machado, is a love letter to an obstinate genre that won’t be gentrified. It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from science fiction, queer theory and horror.

Published just this week, “Her Body and Other Parties” was released in the wake of its success: It’s been named a finalist for the National Book Award and for the Kirkus Prize, and its publisher, Graywolf, has already gone back for a third printing. Not since Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves,” in 2006, has a debut collection of short stories from a relatively unknown author garnered such attention, or deserved it more.

The eight fables in Machado’s book all depict women on the verge. A wife struggles to keep her husband from untying the mysterious ribbon she wears around her neck. The victim of a violent assault discovers she can hear the thoughts of the actors in porn films. Two women make a baby together — or do they? The book’s novella-length centerpiece, “Especially Heinous,” rewrites almost 300 episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” arguably the dominant fairy tale of our time, with its ritualistic opening riff, the women in distress, the tidy resolutions.

Machado is fluent in the vocabulary of fairy tales — her stories are full of foxes, foundlings, nooses and gowns — but she remixes it to her own ends. Her fiction is both matter-of-factly and gorgeously queer. She writes about loving and living with women and men with such heat and specificity that it feels revelatory.