Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU

Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU is a 2013 weird fiction novella by Carmen Maria Machado, told in the form of 272 capsule synopses for the first 12 seasons of the police procedural, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. It was first published in The American Reader, in May 2013, and republished in Machado's 2017 collection Her Body and Other Parties.

"Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU"
AuthorCarmen Maria Machado
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
Genre(s)Weird fiction, Horror
PublisherThe American Reader[1]
Publication dateMay 2013

Synopsis

As Elliot Stabler and Olivia Benson investigate standard cases of horrific depravity and cruelty, they gradually find themselves enmeshed in a mysterious situation involving alien abductions, ghosts with bells for eyes, and—perhaps most disturbingly—the appearance of Abler and Henson, two doppelgängers who are living Stabler and Benson's lives better than Stabler and Benson are.

Reception

The Huffington Post included it on a list of "the 10 Best Short Stories You've Never Read", describing it as "funny, disturbing, canny, and inventive", and "engaging, strange, and wholly original."[2] At National Public Radio, K. Tempest Bradford compared it to "Lovecraft meets Dick Wolf", stating that it is her "favorite" of Machado's work,[3] while Strange Horizons called it a "highlight of the year".[4]

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sofia Samatar judged it to be "one of Machado's most powerful and disturbing works", and noted it as an example of how Machado uses stylistic forms other than those of narrative.[5] The Guardian felt it was a "baggy monster" and a "bizarre phantasmagoria" which "satirises the tendency of long-running narratives to become increasingly baroque".[6]

Background

Machado has explained the story's genesis as the result of having had episodes of Law and Order SVU playing continuously on Netflix while she suffered from a fever for three days in 2009.[7]

References
  1. "Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU | The American Reader". theamericanreader.com. Retrieved 2019-08-13.
  2. The 10 Best Short Stories You've Never Read, by Arna Bontemps Hemenway, at the Huffington Post; published July 14, 2014; retrieved January 25, 2015
  3. We Read The Year's Best New Sci-Fi — So You Don't Have To, by K. Tempest Bradford, at National Public Radio; published March 31, 2014; retrieved January 25, 2015
  4. 2013 in Review by assorted reviewers (Machado reviewed by Gabriel Murray); at Strange Horizons; published January 6, 2014; retrieved January 25, 2015
  5. Double Take: On Carmen Maria Machado, by Sofia Samatar, in the Los Angeles Review of Books; published April 16, 2015; retrieved March 6, 2019
  6. Her Body & Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado review – powerful debut collection, reviewed by Justine Jordan, in The Guardian; published January 18, 2018; retrieved March 6, 2019
  7. Pleasure Principles: An Interview with Carmen Maria Machado, by Lauren Kane; published October 3, 2017; retrieved March 6, 2019
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