In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
When I first read Carmen Maria Machado’s 2016 short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I foisted copies on friends and raved about its feminist, surrealist horror to anyone who will listen. Though Machado’s newest book, In the Dream House, is a memoir, it is a continuation of her signature fusion of folklore, gothic tropes, true crime and the horrors of reality — this time, her own.
Told in fragments, vignettes, and shifting timelines, In the Dream House is Machado’s account of a dream relationship turned impossibly dark, devolving into gaslighting and domestic abuse. Machado’s never-named former lover is referred to only as The Woman in the Dream House, whose intense fixation on Machado brings both heaven and hell. Having spent a lifetime feeling at times marginalized and ostracized by her body, sexuality and ethnic identity, Machado is intoxicated by the idea of being wanted, and falls hard for The Woman in the Dream House.
Like the opening scenes of a horror film in which the happy family is blissfully unaware of the nightmare ahead, the shiny promises of the Dream House soon turn sinister as the woman within it reveals her true self. Machado leans into the tension and mounting dread by zig-zagging through the timeline of her relationship like a shadowy haunted house, the ghosts of her relationship slowing making themselves known in short, discursive chapters.
Even when the truth of her experience finally comes out, Machado struggles to to be believed, much less sympathized with, as a victim of abuse. She wonders whether her suffering would be more easily believed if she was a white woman, if her abuser was a man, if she bore the more visible hallmarks of abuse. Most of all, though, she still stings from the idea that her relationship with The Woman in the Dream House turned to a nightmare: “The whole world was out to get you both. You grieve from the betrayal.” Get your copy now. —Olivia Niland
