“The electrical charge of a woman wronged—that was what the world needed.” So states the narrator of “Operation Hecuba,” one of nine short stories in Maggie Cooper’s scintillating new collection, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies. “Operation Hecuba” tells the story of a future world in which dwindling resources have led Big Industry literally to harness the power of female rage. The women working at the new power plants are confined to “Hellboxes” for eight hours a day, exposed to simulations which will “incite the sort of righteous anger that made the generators hum to life.” One doubts the simulation-builders had to look very hard for material.

The story, like the collection at large, fizzes with justified anger at our misogynistic world. It feels apropos to this political moment—I am writing this review in the southern US in the dying days of the Biden administration, as we await the reascendency of a president who has promised to protect women “whether the women like it or not.” Yet while The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is a book that speaks to our contemporary sexist hellscape, it is far from a pessimistic or despondent one. Cooper’s line about the world needing women’s anger, like so much in this book, is a finely crafted double-edged sword: Women’s oppressors may rely on their anger, but so do the women themselves. The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies is about misogyny, yes, but it’s also about resistance, mutuality, and the joyful strangeness of real women’s lives.

The collection is divided into three sections, each containing three stories, labelled “Furies,” “Maidens,” and “Crones.” It is the middle section in which one finds the bleakest depictions of female suffering. In “The Cure,” we follow a set of women through a nightmarish hydrotherapy regime. We are warned early on that “[t]he waters are the cure, and cures are not always pleasant.” Bathing in the waters is ostensibly an infertility treatment, but we soon learn the horrifying truth:

We are, all of us, of childbearing age, and yet we have failed to bear what is expected. So we soak, and after, we go to the mirrors that hang in our bare rooms, where we study our own faces.

*

Change is slow, but when it comes, we see it. Ears, lips, noses—the parts of ourselves that we once learned to recognize. They erode slowly, washed smooth by the water, so that we seem to blend together.

As the women’s features fall away, the doctors start calling them by the wrong names, underlining their loss of identity. Things only get worse when the collective “we” begin drinking the waters, despite being warned not to, and eventually give birth to inert babies, “dense and pewter-colored.” The disturbing mineral imagery is heightened by the story’s tragic ending, as the women return to the waters: “We dissolve like powder, like sugar, like salt.” “The Cure” is a powerful story of objectification and compulsory motherhood, as lyrical as it is chilling.

Compulsory motherhood is also a core concept in “Red Cherry.” The protagonist is a pregnant teenager from North Carolina, staying at something called the Motherhood Project. Sleeping in a communal dorm and permitted only one hour of computer time per day, the inmates of the Motherhood Project are forced to watch mind-numbing instructional videos on baby care “starring a blond actress with raccoony eye makeup who acts like she has never actually seen a baby before.” It’s a stinging critique of the punitive and soul-crushing nature of so-called pro-life politics, but what stands out most is the protagonist’s humanity. She spends much of the story fantasising about eating at Cook Out (a southern US fast food chain), and the story’s tenderest moment combines this fantasy with a vision of her old friends:

At Cook Out, my order varies depending on my mood, but it always involves a red cherry shake and a side of onion rings. Sometimes, I’ll go steak-style burger with extra A1; other times, BBQ sandwich. Occasionally, I’ll do a corn dog, although my best friend Jessie would say that a corn dog is what got me in this situation in the first place. My other friend Emily would say that’s crude, and she would be right, but that wouldn’t keep us all from laughing about it.

It’s a touching scene of teenage togetherness, which makes its status as the imaginings of a trapped, disempowered young woman all the more heartbreaking.

In an interview with Dana Diehl for The Masters Review, Cooper discusses the section titles of her book: “The fact that [they are] plural […] seems important—one of the things that interests me about all these categories is the way they have more power when we can occupy them together.” While not every story in the collection features women finding solutions to their oppressive circumstances, solidarity is a core component every time they do. In “Operation Hecuba,” the new power plant workers start organising, eventually articulating “a new history, in which one witch is burned, but many witches make the world burn around them.” In the title story, the disgruntled narrator informs theme park attendees that “if you’re interested in supporting staff efforts to organize, you can find us at @ourbodiesourunion on all social platforms.” And in the delightful queer pirate fantasy “Our Lady of the High Seas,” the all-female polyamorous crew has every new recruit take the same Oath: “a woman’s place is on the seas, and pirates-in-arms live only for each other.”

Yet while the book’s politics are important and movingly articulated, I do not want to understate the raw quality of Cooper’s prose. The book’s finest story is “A Lesbian’s Guide to Cave Exploration,” which depicts a woman falling in love with, and having her heart broken by, Lois, a member of her all-female spelunking team. Cooper depicts the romantic nature of caving with thoughtful attention to the rhythms of prose and the lives of our ageing main characters:

Lois is the leader, so it is fitting that she is the one to raise the question. When will we stop this halfway game of dipping in and coming back up for air, these long weekend expeditions that end back at a half-paved parking lot. When we will go for good?

There is a silence, and I listen to the hush of the cave, under which I can almost hear our four hearts beating: today, today, today, today. Then Kaoli shakes her head, her hair like a horse’s tail. I notice the first threads of silver in the thick black.

This same thoughtfulness is then applied to the caving nature of romance, as sparks begin to fly between the narrator and Lois:

I don’t like to eat too much when we’re in the caves but, when we get back, we’ll all go out and I’ll fill myself with cold beer and cheesy fries. We’re getting too old for this, Sasha jokes, but she doesn’t specify whether she’s talking about the fries or the rest of it. That same night, Lois follows me into the bathroom and puts her hand in my pants, and a cave opens up inside of me.

It’s a voluptuous moment, the protagonist’s gorging on base yet gratifying fare shading neatly into other kinds of appetite. But it can’t last; their relationship fizzles out after Lois suffers a spelunking injury, prompting her to give up the sport and move to San Francisco (“She takes up surfing, posing wet-haired in photos taken at Ocean Beach”). The narrator, missing Lois, turns to solo expeditions:

Without the others, I move more quickly. I used to think the caves were quiet, but now, they echo with remembered sounds: footsteps, breath. Today, today, today. My knees ache, but I keep going. After six-and-a-half hours I can sense Lois, just up ahead, around the next curve. If I can only catch up to her, I will tell her I’m ready now—ready to go deeper, ready to stay.

It’s a bittersweet ending to this bittersweet tale, the subterranean imagery and rich, rhythmic prose perfectly arrayed to heighten the sense of longing. On a political level, this kind of story feels important; on a craft level, it’s absolutely essential.

I must admit, sitting in my office writing this review, that I find it difficult to be hopeful. We cannot ask books to save us from ethnic cleansing, environmental degradation, or virulent queerphobia—even good books like The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies. But we can turn to them for inspiration. As reminders of what we have, of what we must fight for, and, most importantly, of who we must fight with. The world needs the anger of women wronged. Tomorrow may look uncertain; the day after that, apocalyptic. But we all have within us the same raw, fragile energy of a spelunking lesbian, chaotic and hungry and ridiculous and human. It’s something we will have to carry with us for the foreseeable future. It might, in fact, be the only thing we have.

Today, today, today.