IN THE DREAM HOUSE is Machado's memoir about being in an abusive relationship with another woman. She tells her story through vignettes framed by classic story tropes, drawing heavily from folklore and fairy tales to place the story of queer abuse into the overall human narrative.

This book is terrifying, heartbreaking, beautiful, insightful, incisive, and immediate. I have never read anything like it. Machado sets pieces of her story into nearly every type of storytelling framework, from ancient myth to film noir and beyond. Most strikingly, many anecdotes are "sourced" from folklore tropes - Machado writes herself as the heroine of a fairytale, albeit a Brothers Grimm-style one where the heroine must endure great pain and trauma to reach her promised bright future.

I was particularly fascinated by the varying uses of "You" and "I" when moving between her own past and present viewpoints. Like even she could not quite bring herself to believe that she had gone through this ordeal.