somber yet riveting, Carmen Maria Machado's In the Dream House is a genre-defying masterpiece of a memoir. it details Machado's abusive relationship with a woman who lives in "the Dream House," a place where Machado constantly feels unsafe and tense. anecdotes and fables punctuate In the Dream House to create a surreal, almost illusory narrative that is nevertheless still very real.

i felt legitimate suspense and fear while turning these pages, which is no easy feat for someone who is not easily scared (especially by books), and the fact that In the Dream House is not a fictional gothic horror novel makes it all the more terrifying. Machado is cheeky, and though Dream House is not meant to be a horror novel, it pulls from dozens of horror tropes to construct its patchwork quilt of narrative. ultimately, it is not meant to be read as horror because it is not horror--it is real, and Machado proves that reality can be just as scary as fiction.

the interpolation of the more traditional memoir-narrative with cultural and academic tidbits is, in my opinion, genius. occasionally i grew weary of the more obvious allegories (The Queen and the Squid comes to mind), but overall it was striking and extremely effective. more than once, a side-story would pull me in with intrigue only to stab me with its narrative relevancy. it is a genuinely brilliant way of putting very tough source material in a memoir without having it be morose all the way through, while still maintaining narrative momentum through the reader's curiosity of the main "story".

Machado's voice is precise yet emotional. this memoir contains some of the most awful things she has experienced, yet she wrote about them with clarity and poignancy. i will be on the lookout for things she writes in the future (and hopefully will read some of her backlog)!