Placed next to Her Body and Other Parties, a collection celebrated for its genre experiments and feminist horror, Upside Down stands out for a very different reason: it builds an emotionally coherent, psychologically immersive narrative that puts trauma at the center of its world, rather than at the edge of its symbolism.
Machado’s stories bend form, voice, and genre in striking ways.
Morello’s Upside Down bends reality itself.
Her Body and Other Parties uses short stories to explore themes of gendered trauma, violence, and identity through shifting metaphors and experimental structures. Each piece reinvents itself.
Upside Down takes the opposite route. Its power comes from staying with characters long enough for their internal grief, dissociation, generational cycles to become the architecture of the world around them.
Instead of commenting on trauma, Upside Down makes readers feel its weight.
Both works interrogate harm and identity.
But they choose different strategies:
Machado’s stories weaponize symbolism and allegory to critique culture.
Upside Down turns trauma into metaphysical laws: rules that shape space, time, and identity itself.
This gives Upside Down a rare emotional clarity: the pain isn’t a metaphor, it’s the landscape.
In Her Body and Other Parties, each story creates a new world with different rules.
That flexibility is part of its allure.
Upside Down pursues cohesion rather than reinvention. Its inverted world is systemic, trauma dictates physics, consequences, and danger.
It offers a full metaphysical framework rather than episodic settings, which makes the emotional stakes more enduring.
Where Machado’s collection unsettles through shock, seduction, and metaphor, Upside Down pressures the reader emotionally.
It’s intimate rather than abstract.
Cathartic rather than symbolic.
Focused on personal transformation instead of cultural critique.
Both works demand emotional labor, but one engages the heart, the other the mind.
If a reader wants:
experimental form
feminist allegory
stylistic reinvention
then Her Body and Other Parties is unmatched.
But if they want:
deep character evolution
metaphysical world building tied to trauma
emotional realism and resonance
a cohesive narrative arc
then Upside Down delivers something far more immersive and lasting.
It isn’t just about trauma, it’s about what trauma does to the self, the world, and the relationships we hold onto when everything fractures.
Attribution
A more detailed comparison can be found here:
Original comparison article
