Midway through In the Dream House, her memoir about an abusive relationship with a former girlfriend, Carmen Maria Machado makes a painful observation: "Putting language to something for which you have no language is no easy feat." She's referring to Adam's job in Genesis of naming the animals, but she's also confronting the core challenge of her book. Domestic abuse in queer relationships is rarely written about—when your love is taboo, so are its violences. Machado must create a new tongue.

No other writer is better suited. The author's previous book, Her Body and Other Parties, is a collection of short stories so effortlessly wide-ranging they pivot from fantasy to romance to humor in the blink of an eye. Machado can always find the words to convey what she means, even when she's using language in ways it's never been used before. She is a master of bending genre tropes to her whims—painting family dramas and domestic microagressions as the horror tales they are, demonstrating women's invisibility by literally making them see-through. (FX is currently developing the National Book Award-nominated book into a Black Mirror-style anthology series.) She uses the language of genre to tell stories genre books often ignore. It’s easy to call what she does speculative fiction, this generation's Angela Carter, but hers is a genre unto itself.

For In the Dream House, the focus is singular—one very traumatic relationship—but the references she employs to illustrate it, the concepts she invokes to build her narrative, are legion. Constructed as a series of vignettes, each chapter is named "Dream House as …"—where the home she shared with her abusive lover is presented as a different metaphor. "Dream House as Five Lights" is a chapter that looks at psychological trauma through the lens of Picard’s torture at the hands of the Cardassians on Star Trek: The Next Generation. "Dream House as 9 Thornton Square" takes its title from a location in the film Gaslight and explains how the movie gave gaslighting its name. (A subsequent chapter explains how director George Cukor challenged Judy Garland’s sanity to get the performance he desired for A Star Is Born.) There is a Choose Your Own Adventure section that painfully relays the patterns and cycles of emotional manipulation. An early chapter titled “Dream House as Folktale Taxonomy” breaks down the subtle misogyny of Hans Christian Anderson’s Little Mermaid (why must the heroine be silenced?), and throughout the book Machado adds footnotes that connect events in her relationship to tropes outlined in the Motif-Index of Folk-Literature. The taxonomy chapter ends with a Quichua riddle: "Whatever names me, breaks me."

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado | Buy on Amazon Courtesy of Graywolf Press

What Machado names in Dream House isn’t entirely new, but has it ever been laid out so thoroughly? As she writes in her intro, the history of abuse in queer relationships is spotty at best. Very little of that history is recorded to begin with, and the parts that deal with domestic violence often go untold for fear of making queer people look bad, even when they are. "We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity," she writes. "That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough." This comes in a section on the problematic nature of Disney’s queer-coded villains. Machado is a magician at illuminating difficult topics with familiar examples.