Especially Heinous: 272 Views of Law & Order SVU

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.

The Huffington Post included the novella on a list of "the 10 Best Short Stories You've Never Read", describing it as "funny, disturbing, canny, and inventive" as well as "engaging, strange, and wholly original."^[2] Writing for NPR, 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]

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]