I finished the last story this morning. It looks like I'm the outlier that really liked Especially Heinous, though I did read it in small bursts over the course of a week. If I rushed through I would've thought it dragged as well.
Detached is a good word, VV. I just noticed that every story outside of Heinous is a first person narrative, but most of them feel like the characters telling the story aren't fully invested in the worlds. I like unreliable narrators and little details that nag at you, something that's left to your interpretation, like in Real Women have Bodies where the roads are just covered in ice, but they haven't had storms recently. Could be they're just in winter, could be that climate change progressed and they're in permafrost, could be post-nuclear winter. Not the point, but the setting helps sell the uneasiness of death/change that the women are going through. I suspect because it's only affecting women there's no major driver to get to the root of it.
I liked The Resident a lot, even if it is a messy ghost story. I don't know if the naming some people/places and blanking out others was successful, but I liked the ambiguity of everyone, especially the protag. When Lydia is done with C____'s bullshit after she brings her the rabbit half that mysteriously appeared, you realize that C___ has probably only been documenting things that put her in a decent, if not good light. Did she leave her wife, or was she kicked out? Is everything a lie just so C___ can remember and focus on past trauma, instead of addressing the current marital problems? Why did The Painter only become Known to C____ after Lydia left the premises? Questions that don't have answers, or really, that have too many answers.
One I didn't get a full picture for was the last story, Difficult at Parties. Is there a straight timeline here with the protagonist coming home from the hospital, going to the party, and then just psychoanalyzing herself for days/weeks as she has mental breaks? We never find out what she was in the hospital for, but I assume violence, possible rape. She starts watching porn and either hears or imagines the performers' inner thoughts, maybe as a mirror to her own detachment from her trauma. It's implied strongly that her maybe-ex boyfriend is sleeping with others, and we know he wants her out of the apartment. And then it just kinda ends.
