This Machine Feeds - by Heather Parry (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Characters battle with the unsettling surreality of a near-future surveillance state in this new collection of interlinking short stories from macabre mastermind Heather Parry.

"One of the most important new voices in fiction." --Alan Moore, award-winning author of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

Set in an eerily near future, this collection of innovatively structured literary vignettes from gothic genius Heather Parry offers a morbid descent into what awaits in the endgame of capitalism.

Heather, a young performance artist with middling talent but flawless instincts for self-promotion, becomes an emblem of our times. As she prepares a work that promises ultimate revelation, her sense of the real begins to warp beyond recognition, and she sacrifices herself on the altar of her art.

By smashing apart the circuit board of late-capitalist life, an ecosystem of surveillance and exploitation emerges. In the sparking cables and blinking lights, we see clearly the humming madness beneath the surface of every image, which once glimpsed can never be looked at the same way again. And the violence of a world that insists on value in constant visibility.

Taking its reader on a cultural hellride--from re-enactments of JFK's assassination to cherished friends that turn into pillars of salt, from a young woman's domestic staff being linked to her psyche to a women's rights campaigner who employs a wet nurse under unusual conditions--This Machine Feeds answers the question that howls in all of our chests: how can I be sane in insane times?

About the Author

Heather Parry is a short story writer, novelist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, New Gothic Review, The Best of British Fantasy (2018 & 2019), and New Writing Scotland 35. She won the 2016 Bridge Award for an Emerging Writer and was a recipient of the Cove Park 2017 Scottish Emerging Writer residency. In 2018 she was a prize winner in the Mslexia Short Story Award and, in 2021, a Hawthornden Fellow. Her debut novel Orpheus Builds a Girl won the Laxfield Literary Launch Prize and was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Her second novel Carrion Crow was published in the UK by Doubleday in 2025 and in the US by Pushkin Press in 2026.