Please fucking read Especially Heinous: 272 views of Law & Order SVU
Not to put too fine a point on it.
If Especially Heinous: 272 views of Law and Order SVU by Carmen Maria Machado is anything, it’s good writing. That’s a heavy, deep good. I want you to imagine an enormous oceanic trench as you read that. It’s good.
I’ve recently become aware that I have some authority to make these calls. In the same way you become aware that you can just pocket choclate bars from your local supermarket as you leave. I’m probably not allowed to, but anyone in a position to stop me is too busy with other things or couldn’t care less. Â
But if the English degree on the wall isn’t a green light to passionately recommend experimental short fiction then I really don’t know what else it’s there for.
That’s why I’m determined to ask you to please read Especially Heinous: 272 views of Law and Order: SVU.
Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House, started this novella as a writing exercise. After coming down with a fever, she marathoned the first twelve seasons of the show over the course of three days, and then tried to write a story using only the materials given. Taking loose inspiration from the show, she’s written her own blurbs under every episode title of Law and Order SVU. It’s a hell of thing.
You can read it in two sittings or several bus rides and in the most literal meaning of the word Especially Heinous is Haunting. It has things like the characters being able to hear the Law and Order ‘Dun-Dun’ intro sound, terrified of this deep heartbeat that follows them. While it does get supernatural, equally unnerving is the stuff it shares in common with the show.
It’s important to note here that Machado doesn’t exactly enjoy Law and Order SVU. This isn’t a fan doing an alternate version of their favourite show, in fact, she chose to do this because she didn’t like it. Specifically, she hated the way SVU turns the topic of SA into crime drama serialised television.
That’s the warning about this text. I really want you to read it but read it on stable ground. It’s not something I’d read at the beach, probably don’t read it before going out for a fun dinner. It’s a lot even for crime writing – even for Machado – and that’s the point. Machado doesn’t treat the topic as a tool to facilitate the drama; instead it is centred and pervasive and she refuses to look away. If you are ready for that, then what you’ll find alongside it is writing that is both inventive and utterly engaging. Â
Rarely does an author invent a new form and make full use of it in the same go, yet Machado pulls it off. The story has seamless cohesion between its format, narrative style and message. She takes the stop-start nature of episode blurbs and embraces it, resulting in this bewitching atmosphere she couldn’t have achieved any other way. Machado drifts into poetry for one blurb, then slides straight into a conversation, then does purely descriptive work in the next. It’s an ice cold drip of water falling from the cieling onto your tongue, never quite giving you a full picture.
While it’s tempting to recommend this to people as ‘fever dream law and order’ that ignores the artistic tradition Machado is evoking here. How we feel things are, and how they actually are differ in reality, but they don’t have to in narrative. She doesn’t try to stick the rules of realism, sacrificing material clarity for emotional grip, as a result she’s able to cut much closer to the bone than if she had. Â
It’s important to know your reviewer. I can’t truly be unbiased, so it’s better to make you aware of my biases: I like unconventional structure, I love magical realism and the Latin American tradition of it, I adore crime drama that critiques the assumptions about law and order it is predicated on. None of that might be you, but the reason I still emphatically recommend this text is that reading it will expand your understanding of what a narrative can be. ‘Broaden your horizons’ is the wrong phrase. Especially Heinous is submarine, taking you deeper, deeper below.