Rag: Stories

by Maryse Meijer

One of Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Tor.com's Books to Read in February

From the author of Heartbreaker, a disquieting collection tracing the destructive consequences of the desire for connection

A man, forgotten by the world, takes care of his deaf brother while euthanizing dogs for a living. A stepbrother so desperately wants to become his stepsibling that he rapes his girlfriend. In Maryse Meijer’s decidedly dark and searingly honest collection Rag, the desperate human desire for connection slips into a realm that approximates horror.

Meijer’s explosive debut collection, Heartbreaker, reinvented sexualized and romantic taboos, holding nothing back. In Rag, Meijer’s fearless follow-up, she shifts her focus to the dark heart of intimacies of all kinds, and the ways in which isolated people’s yearning for community can breed violence, danger, and madness. With unparalleled precision, Meijer spins stories that leave you troubled and slightly shaken by her uncanny ability to elicit empathy for society’s most marginalized people.

Genres: Short Stories, Horror, Fiction, Collections, Dark, Contemporary, Adult

160 pages, Paperback

First published February 12, 2019

About the author

Maryse Meijer is the author of the story collections Heartbreaker, which was one of Electric Literature’s 25 Best Short Story Collections of 2016, and Rag, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Pick and a finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, as well as the novella Northwood. She lives in Chicago.

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just as armed and dangerous as its predecessor, but slightly less scintillating.

[Kathe Koja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fierce, subtle, flat-out gorgeous, warm with dread: no one's voice is like Maryse's. I loved HEARTBREAKER and RAG is totally different and every bit as passionate and I love it every bit as much. I could quote favorite lines but why spoil the stories for new readers? Highly recommended.

[Bill Hsu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This cuts. It's so sharp, so harsh.

It's hard for me to write a review of this, without breaking after each story. When I finish each piece, it usually overwhelms my impressions of the previous ones; it's hard for me to remember specifics. The events remind me of Lucia Berlin, Kyle Minor (when is he going to publish a new book?), maybe Brian Allen Carr (his southern realist stories, not the bizarro), who are generally more free with their expositions.

Meijer's (mostly male) protagonists often trace a seemingly harmless idea, from an innocent starting point, to obsessive, dangerous, irrational places. I love Meijer's prose, and her careful choices for what little to show us through the pinholes of her protagonists' quietly horrific perspectives.

Even "The Lover", which meanders just a tad, ends like this:

You know, I said, God loves Maggie very much. But he doesn't give a shit about you. The Dane looked up in surprise. I showed him the gold. I showed him the gun. I kissed his mouth. Please, he said, and it was done.

And all is forgiven.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one did not cut me quite as close to the quick as Heartbreaker did (perhaps because I was already acclimated to her style and had expectations?). The stories themselves just didn't cohere as fully as they did in that first collection. Still very good overall, though, and I'm looking forward to reading her novel. Note: the story 'Francis' employs violence toward animals in what felt to me like a gratuitous way intended for shock value. But I always tend to view that type of violence in fiction as gratuitous. (3.5, rounded up)

[Jenny (Reading Envy)]

These are not the stories for me. I made it through a miscarriage story but had to bail once I hit the dog testing story.

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting collection. Slice of life stories, but shaved very close to the skin, some bleeding even. At first these come across as slightly surreal and occasionally overstylized, but later stories are much more conventionally structured and (to me at least) more appealing. Definitely dark, these are tales of loneliness and sadness and uncertain attempts to connect. The latter might prove to be as challenging as connecting to the book itself, it just doesn’t lend itself to this sort of attachment, it maintain the distance with a sort of studied viscerality and emotional aloofness. All bleak, some positively depressing, some merely odd…certainly unorthodox, not the sort of thing to easily enjoy or eagerly recommend. At about 100 minutes for 160 pages, it works as an experiment and can be noted for its originality, but not really something to like or love. Thanks Netgalley.

[Darryl Suite · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I imagined having what she had, a place in my body that could splash an entire room with my insides and then let me walk away.”
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AAAAAAAAAAH. I’ve read books that provide moments which shudder my soul, and conjure visceral reactions that I feel from my crown to my toes. There are no mere moments here; Rag felt like a violent shake. I love when fiction has the ability to unnerve, and guess what? I’m in love right now. Not being shady, but I believe there are several people out there who only read to continue validating what they already know. This book will force you to get outside of yourself and dip into the darkest depths of human existence. Although every story is quite short, there is a wealth of psychological depth that will horrify yet mesmerize. There’s a reason why when you read other reviewers’ take on Rag, the words “Holy fuck” or the like tends to come up.
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Every person will have their own favorite story. What I love about this collection is that even though the stories are not interconnected, they all bleed into each other, forming one guttural-inducing whole. It’s a dissection of the darkest corners of our mind. These characters can fall into some truly murky territory. We’re introduced to loners, stalkers, manipulators, rapists, psychologically-damaged individuals, and wait until you read the centerpiece story “The Rainbow Baby” to see what and who that is all about!! Plus there is a moment in this collection where a character labels a particular act a “kiss” and I nearly lost my mind by the brilliance of that revelation. Looking at the list of character traits I’ve mentioned may seem unsavory. But you don’t get it. Yup, the subject matter is horrifying. Yup again to the situations being repulsive. But the characters are so tragically human it hurts. And this is what makes this collection an ingenious piece of fiction: even within the darkest of psyches and dimensions, there can still be a yearning for the simplicity of human connection.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'Certainly there is a history of the incident, going back before my time: injuries, a childhood illness, ostracism, mental disorder, loneliness, screams. A history of chance.'

These stories are raw and I devoured them. They are about bleeding out, deprivation, forbidden attraction, hiding from the world, the meaning of freedom, and all the things we think and don’t say or feel and keep in the shadows. Humans are beasts, we’re fragile creatures and mean ones too. We destroy others, we destroy ourselves. We’re full of longing and disgust for our longings too. I think the most moving excerpt for me is from the story Jury, but I am only going to give a line or two from it, “They were so helpless. They cut themselves, starved themselves, got themselves killed.” Women, girls, because our reality is that dangerous, that threatening in the world we all share. He is just a father, sitting on a jury thinking he can understand a fellow juror because he notices something about her, as if labeling a thing means it is easily repaired. The line about his grown daughter too, loaded with meaning, for me anyway. “This was a girl with everything. And yet she never smiled.” Jury resonated with me, its brutal and strangely quiet at the same time. It is all the things that don’t need to be said to understand even the relationship between father and daughter. He just doesn’t really get it, he is frustrated by the helplessness women deal with and yet, angry at the ways we fail to acknowledge the danger.

All of the stories have meaning, purpose. In Rainbow Baby a mother’s grief is a specter, a bother like a living nightmare, decay in the brain. The hatred and betrayal of an old friend in Viral is so poisonous and sad, an ugly violence that isn’t far-fetched. It is born from envy, it is ‘animal hate’ of someone who ‘hasn’t known pain’. How broken our narrator of the story, and we the readers watching the transgression and knowing the horrible end, nothing you can do to stop it. Too, the manipulation at times young girls are so good at, with boys who can’t think more than “five minutes ahead”. What I think is fantastic about these characters is that they are incredibly developed for such short stories. With that line, a boy who “can’t think five minutes ahead”, it makes him such a solid mess, easily led. I can see him eager as a puppy. I feel his naive stupidity as much as I felt the father’s anger and fears in Jury. If someone is suffering in a story, they can explain it to themselves, excusing it, erasing anything others would find seedy or even criminal, when in The Brother, the youngest takes what isn’t his, violates a girl. All because he longs to connect, to have what his brother has. Just like all the people on the outside, scratching to be let in!

As a reader I measure my responses as a human being, how is it I can be horrified and yet also feel sorry for the monster lurking in others. It’s so much easier to divide ourselves in categories, well I am nothing like that, there is nothing so primitive within my soul. Of course there is… the older you get the more you are tested by time, tragedy, experiences, the more things lash against you. It’s hard being your better self, your most human self. These are stories about feelings you should force to withdraw before you make a mistake you can’t take back. They are tales of sometimes allowing your dark side to run wild, or your emotions take over. It is being hungry with need, and my God desire and need can get ugly. Some offer themselves up as sacrifice to those who would soil them, I felt that in The Lover. Other’s close themselves away from the rest of us in The Shut-In, afraid of the world when they may be more monster than the threats they cower from. The ending of that story gutted me, it is such a small act but how I howled inside much like the unmasked.

The stories all stayed with me, and moved me in wonderfully strange and terrible ways. Yes, read it! From these stories alone I decided to start following the author.

Publication Date: February 12, 2019

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

[Ana WJ · Rating 3 out of 5]

it’s giving Euphoria back stories
3.7 stars

[Brian O'Connell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ghastly excellence. Exquisitely sparse prose that conveys some pretty deep levels of horror and misery—the sheer nausea and grotesquerie these compact little paragraphs encompass can be stunningly impressive. Even when the plots skirt outright melodrama, the severe intensity of the writing keeps you gripped. My favorites were “Her Blood”, “Francis”, and especially “The Rainbow Baby”, one of the best short stories I’ve read, I think.

[ChelseaRenee Lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not even sure what to say, some of the most insanely simple but effed up stories, the beautiful simplicity that creates just an uncomfortable, gross vibe makes the reading an experience, which is a nice change, especially for short stories (which I don’t usually make a point to read). Definitely going to pick up more by Meijer.

[Ylenia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Fave stories: Viral, Evidence.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to keep an eye on the fascinating blog of Dennis Cooper, a queer American writer I am hardly alone in prizing very highly, famous as he is for transgressive fictions, though hardly exclusively these, focusing on violent extremes of sadomasochistic courtship among gay men. His blog focuses on literature, cinema, music, and art for the most part, though he has also in the past regularly posted slightly-altered adds for male escorts that he finds online, a practice that may well have something to do with Google’s having temporarily taken the blog down without explanation a few years back, simultaneously disabling Cooper’s Gmail, reprisals that may not seem entirely impossible to fathom when it comes to an outlaw writer whose provocations have been occasionally quite brazen, though objectively unreasonable in this particular case all the same. Recently Mr. Cooper posted a comprehensive list of books, films, and other cultural-artistic minutiae from the first half of this year that he has himself found especially rewarding or praiseworthy. Among the works of literary fiction included in the blog post was RAG, the second collection of short fiction from Maryse Meijer, an author whose name rang vaguely familiar to me. The book seemed extremely compelling based on Cooper’s brief summation and other commentary I briefly glanced over elsewhere. That the collection was put out by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, a publisher about as venerated as they come, could not help but additionally bode well. Cooper himself provides a blurb for the paperback, invoking the legacies of Thomas Bernhard and Lucia Berlin, praising Meijer’s “ultraprecise prose” which he deems “too unique.” From a writer known for exploring the incendiary limits of libidinal excess, that word “too” takes on a special coded significance. The little bit of investigation I did into RAG before having at the text itself informed me that a good number of its stories are written in the first person from the perspectives of male narrators or otherwise explore male subjectivity, and that much of the conduct of these male figures would on the surface appear to be quite aberrant. I had to a certain extent come to expect a book in large part about toxic masculinity, de rigueur subject of contemporary popular discourse, in which a female writer engages in a kind of excoriating literary drag performance, perhaps producing something like a pointedly ironic variation on BRIEF INTERVIEWS WITH HIDEOUS MEN. Though I was not necessarily wildly wide of the mark, RAG is not, as it turns out, exactly that. Yes, most of the stories are narrated by men or otherwise focus on male subjectivity, though the one female narrator featured in the collection, she of the piece entitled “Viral,” may be the most near-sociopathic at hand insofar as concerns a chilling dearth of empathy. The second story, “Good Girls,” is narrated by a dog who recalls being a human male in the past—perhaps in a past life, or perhaps the schematics here are more bizarrely folkloric—and in the story’s denouement conceives of itself as one again on the precipice of manhood having submitted itself to the callous cruelties of the titular good girls, drunk as they are on vodka. “The Lover” is narrated by a provisional male who turns out more strictly to be a literal avenging angel, complete with wings, who visits justice upon the pedophile school teacher who has been the tormented lover for many years of the teenage girl our hitherto markedly standoffish angel-narrator would appear to consider his sacred charge. The final story, from which the collection takes its title, is narrated by a rag, a standard household item that prides itself as being successful “doing my small jobs,” after having been stuffed down the throat of a woman murdered by her male partner. The narrator of “The Shut-In” is not attributed a gender—specificities such as when they (to use the current go-to non-gendered pronoun) tie back their hair into a ponytail not being sufficient to establish sexuation—the story culminating with the narrator entering the house of the shut-in across the street, who is masked and may not be human, and achieving a becoming-animal by way of transgressing personal boundaries. In fact both the narrator-interloper and the monstrous recluse are masked, the implication here apparently that identity is itself a posture, as are the various gendered pretences that serve its routine social enactment. RAG is ultimately not a sledgehammer provocation occupying the male soul like an invading army and purging all the bile, though the other ten stories do all to one extent or another peer directly into distorted male worlds. It does not seem to me that this collection is geared to shock or appall so much as unsettle. The unsettling sort of works doubly. Yes, naturally, these stories are likely to disturb most readers, some no doubt considerably more than others, but unsettling also works in the stories themselves as a compromising of the characters’ world construction from within, the ground destabilized. The book is not a screed on toxic masculinity, but it does set out to demystify and destabilize the phallocentrism (or to crib from feminist critical theory, the ontological phallogocentrism) of explicitly male world-models. I note in Meijer something of the legacy of Georges Bataille’s fixation on base matter—the excremental, putrescence, blood, meat, sundry bodily fluids, et cetera. “Her Blood,” the first story in the collection, is narrated by a young male virgin who works in a pizzeria; after a young woman miscarries in the bathroom of his place of work, bleeding all over the washroom, floors, and furnishings, the narrator cleans up after her, even flushing the expelled unformed fetus down the toilet, subsequently experiencing sexual arousal when reflecting upon the incident. The young woman will return to the pizzeria regularly in the company of her boyfriend, appearing to guardedly flirt with narrator. Sometimes she calls him on the phone shortly after closing, when he is cleaning up, and they attempt halfheartedly to communicate what can only remain unspoken. Firstly the sexual desire connected to blood and the expelled fetus, the intensive stimulus of base matter, and secondarily an emotional and psychic impotence brought about by mental confusion and communicative incapacity. It is precisely that the body is base—connected to death, decay, and the universal tendency-toward-dissolution of biological forms—that charges it with sexual potency, but this in turn renders the male subject quasi-mute, fumbling, dumb and indeterminate. “The Pool,” the fourth story in RAG, extrapolates these themes further. A student lifeguard develops an aberrant obsession with a school teacher who has an accident at the pool where the former overseas activities, nearly drowning as a result. From the opening paragraph: “He swam like a motherfucker to the deep end, panting as he flipped the body over, a sheet of blood over the face, a man’s face, mouth open and reeking chlorine. A tooth missing. A tooth way down in the water. A swollen eye and a huge wound weeping above it, bone winking beneath gaping lips of skin.” Shortly thereafter: “Bobby is the name of the body and Bobby is fine.” This passage encapsulates the body’s loss of organizational integrity, reducing it to base material, and also sees blood merged with water. Bobby is fine? Uh, well... The water in the swimming pool represents a fluid zone of cross-pollination, another kind of dissolution, and the rest of the story becomes one of two in the collection, the other being “The Brother,” in which a male subject becomes so obsessed with another male that his identity begins to lose its integrity, not unlike a gender-flipped equivalent of the movie SINGLE WHITE FEMALE, a psychosexual identity-dissolution thriller from my youth about one woman’s obsessive and monstrous transmutation into the female object of her ardor. If we think about the basic idea of a phallocentric world-model with its rigid set of strictures and categorical differentiations, we can see how the loss of integrity of both the body and of the subject might throw such a world into crisis. Because the characters in RAG consistently have very little in the way of concrete moral or ethical apparatus, because they drift with a kind of half-dead somnambulism from encounter to encounter, we see how they are especially susceptible to these crises of integrity. When at the end of “The Shut-In” the narrator speaks of being transformed into an animal in the commission of an uncontrollable act of overreach, we might be inclined to consider in reflection that most if not all of the characters in the preceding stories have themselves been torn out of their constructed worlds, already only provisionally held together, by the force of animal magnetism, that it is unconscious animal desire (in a fluid animal world) that is attracted to baseness and abjection, serving as the corrosive anarchic thread which finally precipitates a destabilizing abolition of any organizational integrity. The desire in turn cannot adequately be consummated, it can only undo and torment. The narrator of “The Pool” comes to realize of the teacher who obsesses him: “There’s just nothing they can do about it except tear each other’s nerves to shreds. It’s a dead end.” In seeking to act upon desire, the characters routinely lose their basic integrity of self, but not only that, they open themselves to incursions, occupation by sinister forces, as in the story “The Rainbow Baby” where the young boy who narrates shares psychic space with a brother who was stillborn. We might insist that the quintessential phallocentric complex is emotionally intense homophobia, born of a fear of penetration that is always a repressive relationship with the spectre of indeterminacy, loss of control, the body’s finitude, and the subject’s lack of unifying solidity. Meijer brings these repressed elemental (distinctly masculine) horrors as ripples and outright ruptures to the surface of operative consciousness. Crises of meaning and order are fundamentally crises of castration. Basic psychoanalytic theory. Steak, and meat, and bodies, and blood. Meat plays an important role in these stories. Meat itself, subject to rot and infestation by maggots or what have you, eminently serving as base material. Here we might not only think of the influence of Bataille but of the painter Francis Bacon, who repeatedly connected the human form to the kinds of displays one is accustomed to seeing at a butcher’s. In the story “Alice,” the narrator father and overbearing mother gorge their increasingly-obese daughter on endless bloody steaks, subjecting themselves to utter deprivation, the father ultimately outright starving himself, in a gruesome campaign of absurdly misdirected devotion. Later in “Evidence,” a detective fresh from a grisly crime scene—a man’s head has been reduced to viscid mush—considers the bloody steak on the plate before him, all but deaf to the wife who berates him in exasperation. The detective will increasingly begin to lose any sense of who he is or what he is doing: “He watches all the shows with cops in them so he can remember how to act.” His disordered state will only intensify. Sensory stimulation is key throughout RAG when it comes the activation of animal desire, smell playing a constant role. The body produces odours that disgust and excite, especially female bodies. In “The Jury,” the man who narrates, serving as a juror in a murder trial which coincidentally exposes him to horrific photos of a mutilated female body (specifically the genetalia), at one point recalls having been able to detect when his daughter was having her period by way of “the gamy way she smelled.” Repeated emphasis is placed on synthetic odours intended to cover up these base enticements (and otherwise neutralize animal excitation). Soap, body wash, et cetera. In “Viral”: the smell of “furniture polish and fabric softener and lavender candles.” Note also the broke genderless student narrator of “The Shut-In” whose spending money is always quickly reduced to loose change and whose hands consequently “always smelled like quarters.” The animal can be excited both to hunger and to tenderness, and each can spill into the other. Frenzy can follow from or lead to pity, tenderness to malaise or malevolence. The eponymous narrator of “Francis” euthanizes canines for a living, but his boss is not entirely off base in jokingly comparing him to Saint Francis of Assisi. “All those bodies, heaped in the black sacks. Smell of death, lab-death, specific to this place, to these bodies, to me: piss and shit and fur and the bleach I tipped along the steel tables, the tile floor. Vast clouds of death-smell, invisible. I wear a mask but sometimes I take it off. When they arrive. One at a time. Touching their faces to mine. Tenderness. No danger, ever—they’re good dogs. Chopped-down claws. Toothless. I am the man with the gentle hands, lifting them by the ribs from their crates. Setting them onto my lap. Shhh, I say. Hello. Shh.” A pretty dazzling passage, and perfectly characteristic, if more unusually tender than much of what we find elsewhere throughout the collection. The world of animal magnetism does not have strong barriers, just like the previously mentioned swimming pool in which parts and fluids cross-pollinate. Note again the narrator of “The Shut-In,” who asserts that when “you aren’t touched a lot you can feel the closeness of things very acutely,” will go on to momentarily forget what the word “face” means, and later takes heed of “a sort of field,” established with the almost-certainly-not-human shut-in across the street, that is “electric, psychic.” Then there is the rag, an object serving as a "tool" occupying a nebulous zone that connects a man and a woman who the rag itself can only understand as bodies without any special meaning beyond activities they use it to perform (and which thinks of itself as equally using them). Dissolution, loss of control, various annihilating experiences of psychic absorption, crises of integrity, men (primarily men) split open and spilling. Again, these stories have a tendency to upset the phallocentric (or phallogocentric) mandates of patriarchal world-modelling, though I don’t exactly read RAG as a work of malevolent satire or blistering critique. It is too empathic and sober for to be thusly framed. There certainly are many examples of toxic masculinity on hand. The pedophile teacher from “The Lover,” for example, would on the surface seem a fitting literary monster for our times, but he is pitiful and besotted, ashamed and prone to making stabs at a kind of pious contrition, and his incapacity and defeat as a lover of young Maggie involve a tendency “to kiss her, fuck her, cry into her neck.” Desire reduces the man to a state of pitiful wretchedness, he becomes an emotional cripple. The teacher is Danish and referred to as the Dane; surely we are supposed to think of Shakespeare’s tortured Prince Hamlet, the ultimate tragic all akimbo Elizabethan wretch, woeful representative of both agency and incapacity, precisely in those terms a famously challenging role for the actor—fully human, perhaps all too much so, if also partially animal. We should say at this point that Dennis Cooper is right, these stories are indeed written with “ultraprecise prose,” the clinical acumen of a skilled no-fuss surgeon conducting a symphony of cuts. And if this particular doctor has a bit of Frankenstein to her, we should also not fail to recall how Frankenstein’s monster was himself heartrendingly pitiable and far more human than the sum total of his half-rotten, mismatched parts.

[tudor · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Every object conspires against man, is used and then uses."

These stories were so fucking good! They were bleak and sick and intoxicating and downright strange and I liked each one in a different way. My favorite was definitely Pool though. fuck yeah Maryse Meijer.

[Shazia · Rating 5 out of 5]

The phrase that comes to mind when I think about this book is “deliciously disturbing.” Strange, I know, and it’s probably because I like the alliteration but the stories in this collection by Maryse Meijer were just disturbing enough to make me feel uncomfortable but in the best way possible. (I feel like no matter how many times I rephrase this sentence it makes me come off as a sadist but I promise I’m not).

Meijer’s writing isn’t gory or, in my opinion, written just for the shock value. She just seems to have a way with words that was able to keep me captivated with each story, despite the unsettling storylines. The first story in this collection, Her Blood, is perfect in that it sets the tone for the rest of the book – a young girl miscarries in a local pizza shop which results in the shop employee's fixation on her.

Admittedly I didn't love every story in this collection, but there's just something in the way Meijer writes that has definitely caught my attention and I want to dive deeper into her work.

[Lavelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

it feels wrong and weird to say I really enjoyed this book, given how fucked up it is, but...I really enjoyed this book. beneath the disquieting surrealism, spookiness, and violence, lies an ache that I felt in my bones.

but seriously look up trigger warnings beforehand because this was a LOT

[Kris V · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I gave the steak a kiss and it was a lot like other kisses I'd had: cold, smooth, dead." ("Alice")
"...people can't keep their hands off something sick." ("Pool")
"A beautiful woman being dead never surprises him...If she's beautiful, she sees it coming."("Evidence")
"It's laughter that comes from everywhere, from nowhere. You've heard it. At some point, it's had your name all over it." ("Viral")
"All these things between us-masks, eyes, screen doors, windows, houses-filter after filter after filter." ("The Shut-In")

Upon receiving a preview edition of Maryse Meijer's much anticipated second story collection, I knew from the cover image that this I was about to experience a whole new world.
I read through it once with my rainbow colored pencil at the ready, and then a second time to remind myself of what fearless writing looks and sounds like.

The back cover says that she 'humanizes the inhuman,' which I'd say is part true in this collection. The other part is that she reveals the monstrous within humanity, or better yet, the individual monsters we each inhabit - even those of us who try to do better.
She speaks to the living organism that is a mass of people moving each towards their destinations, and the way that preserves someone's invisibility ("The Shut-In").
She pulls zero punches in a story about someone who picks up a job where relief is rendered in the form of a needle, and makes them question what they know about suffering ("Francis").
There are even stories from the perspective of an animal, and an inanimate object - exquisite and jarring tales, which to me, spoke to humanity's arrogance and demise.

What Meijer does in this collection is unveils truths in every day life; the pain and isolation of being human, being ALIVE and surviving that fact. If you're looking for writing that on a line-by-line basis will wake you up, make you feel, cry, groan - this is an unforgettable collection.
In the end, what it taught me, a loner who often weaves her body through masses of people on the street or on trains, is to look out for the faces trying to stay hidden. Those are the ones Meijer writes about, and those are the ones I want to see more of. For they inhabit far more beauty than the trendsetting normals who work so hard to gain our attention.

[B P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Raw and visceral stories about the dregs of society yearning for what all people do, meaningful connection. More often than not, these connections are destructive or outright harmful. Meijer writes these stories with an uncomfortable amount of intimacy, presenting their mindsets and actions through a painfully detailed lens. It is because of this detail that a transformative process occurs between reader and content. You can either double down on your revulsion and believe that these are people that no one would benefit knowing about, or you come to the conclusion that despite how horrible these characters are, they represent a piece of the human condition.

[Marybeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes, I read a book that drowns me and suffocates me. These are the books I love. I read this a couple weeks ago, finished it in a couple days, and tried to get some distance from it. But I can't get the stories out of my head. This may be one of the best collections of short stories I have ever read.

I cannot believe how much Meijer was able to fit into such short stories. The depth of these stories are incredible, the writing is beautiful, and the characters are haunting.

Read this.

Thank you FSG and NetGalley for the ARC.

[Wendy P · Rating 3 out of 5]

I asked for a weird book and this was recommended to me. Weird for sure is a way to describe this collection of short stories. As in any collection, I liked some more than others. The one thing that surprised or more disappointed me was this is a female author but all but one story was from the male perspective. And some of the stories felt developed just for the shock factor. Interesting.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dark, strange, haunting and very inventive! Looking forward to reading more from this author.

[Valeria Monzon-Arguello · Rating 2 out of 5]

wish there was a bit more consistency in the qualities of the short stories

[Liz · Rating 4 out of 5]

A subtle kind of horror that sneaks up on you - I liked most all of these stories, a truly incredible collection all around. I've started to think of short story collections like a new snack you get from Trader Joe's. It can either be addicting, you finish the bag in one sitting. Or its the most vile thing you've ever tasted and you wish you never spent $2.99 on the salt and vinegar apple chips. This was like devouring a bag of the stuffing flavored popcorn (the best seasonal snack they carry).

Here's my short synopsis' and thoughts so I can remember.

Her Blood - 4/5
A woman has a miscarriage in a pizza place and her and the employee bond over the shared experience. I read this right before bed and woke up thinking about every minute detail in this story. This one felt not as insidious or gross but more intimate almost? Very good.

Good Girls - 3/5
A stray dog is being voyeuristic into the lives of the young girls who backyard he lives in. Kinda pervy, gets what he deserves in the end.

Alice - 4/5
A family feeds only the daughter meet, both mother and father are emaciated (father is under 100lbs?!) while she is obese. Very bizarre family dynamics here, also the father is a perv.

Pool - 5/5
A boy slips and falls at a pool, splitting his head open and is rendered unconscious. The lifeguard who gives him mouth to mouth becomes obsessed with the event and essentially stalks the other boy with the desire to recreate it. Gay and weird, loved.

Francis - 5/5
A man who euthanizes dogs for work talking about his experience. He also has a deaf brother who he resents and there's a hint that something insidious happens at the end? So good, Meijer is such a talented writer.

The Brother - 4/5
I'm so conflicted because how am I going to say I like a story about a man violating and committing violence against women, but the social dynamic here is so interesting and also the writing!! Incredible.

Jury - 5/5
About a man serving on a Jury for a brutal murder case of a young woman, he becomes obsessed with a fellow juror who cuts. His daughter is home for spring break. There's so much to unpack with this story, I think this is one of my favorites.

The Rainbow Baby - 4/5
A bizarre little story about a 10 year old who is haunted by his deformed, dead brother who died during birth.

The Lover - 2/5
Least favorite story in the collection - follows a young girl who leaves foster care but eventually comes back and rekindles her relationship with an old teacher (I think?) This one was dull to me.

At the Sea - 3/5
A man and his daughter at the beach, he's doing such a horrible job taking care of her, something's going on with her mother.

Evidence - 2/5
Also didn't click for me, following a detective who seems to be pursuing a cold case for a man who's head was pulverized to pulp.

Viral - 4/5
This is another one where I feel horrible being like "it's good!" Following a girl and a boy who intend to blackmail a fellow classmate for rejecting the boys advances, by filming her masturbating and posting it online. I hated it but also was written well and was compelling.

The Shut-In - 4/5
WEIRD!! This one was weird. It follows a person who's enrolled in college, but doesn't really go to classes or tries, who becomes obsessed with their neighbor who's a shut-in. It's really about 2 people who are on the outskirts of society, one moreso than the other, and the connection they attempt to form. I loved the ending where the college student betrays the shut-in by trying to reveal their identity. So GOOD!!

Rag - 4/5
The title story! This was interesting, told from the perspective of a rag who ends up being used to kill a woman.

[Mima Rambles · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not enjoy reading this short story collection. While the stories were, for the most part, well written and enthralling, this book is horrific and definitely not for everybody. I wouldn’t even be able to list every single trigger warning within this book. If you aren’t up for anything, and I mean pretty much anything, I would definitely take this into consideration before reading.

Her Blood: 3/5

The collection definitely gets better further on, but the first few stories were weak. This one wasn’t a bad read, but it was one of the most forgettable.

Good Girls: 2/5

A pretty weak story, but this still managed to ruin dogs for me.

Alice: 3.5/5

This was really bizarre. It felt as if the commentary was not utilised as much as it could have been, however.

Pool: 4.5/5

I can’t quite articulate why I liked this one so much. It just felt so human. It was really easy to connect with the story because of this.

Francis: 4.5/5

Very well written, but also very upsetting.

The Brother: 2/5

I didn’t hate this one but it felt a little pointless and unfinished. I didn’t feel attached either whatsoever, this was definitely one of the weaker entries in the collection.

Jury: 4/5

Really dark but I enjoyed this story quite a lot.

The Rainbow Baby: 5/5

This was so devastatingly sad. Despite being so short it really managed to pack a punch and it was written phenomenally.

The Lover: 4/5

This was another story that really effected me. It was one of those experiences where you come out of a story feeling really empty and sad.

At The Sea: 4/5

In all honesty, this was a little too brief for me to really have anything to say about it. However I feel the need to give it a 4/5 because it really did hit home for me. I adored the ending.

Evidence: 3/5

A gripping enough story but ultimately it felt empty.

Viral: 3.5/5

A lot of these stories don’t seem to do enough with what they have and this is a really good example of that. Still an engaging read, though.

The Shut-In: 5/5

This was the only story that actually made me feel some form of positive emotion while reading it. While that ended up ruined by the end, this was still beautiful. I really cared about both the characters.

Rag: 4/5

I struggled to understand the story at times but the prose was excellent.

[Imran · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting set of stories that explore the simplicity of bonding. All that's needed is 1 dimension for people to crave each other, to become attached.

"I imagined having what she had, a place in my body that could splash an entire room with my insides and then let me walk away. I got an erection though I didn't mean to."

"It's a mystery how he remembers things, some details lost and others crystal clear; sensations, sounds, not in order but distinct as slaps to the face."

"If you didn't think it was at least possible to be liked, you would never look anyone in the face, you would never pick up the phone, you would never leave your house. I had thought for a long time that I was just waiting for something to happen to me and that that was the point of living. To become a part of something else."

[etherealacademia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was traumatizing and uncomfortable to read. The author is highly skilled with language, but I can’t bring myself to recommend this to anyone because of how violent, sickening, and triggering most of the stories are. The only one I can truly recommend is “Pool”— it felt like Richard Siken’s “Little Beast”.

[Marko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorite stories: Her Blood, Alice, Pool, The Rainbow Baby and Viral.

[İpek · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful prose — dark, heavy, and goes THERE.

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

some stories were better than others but they all felt a bit edgy for edgy's sake

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, extremely unpleasant, grimy, repulsive, and a bit heartbreaking. Difficult to get through.