Organ Meats

by K-Ming Chang

LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FINALIST AN AUTOSTRADDLE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

Best friends Anita and Rainie find refuge by an old sycamore tree with its neighboring lot of stray dogs who have a mysterious ability to communicate with humans. The girls learn that they are preceded by generations of dog-headed women and woman-headed dogs whose bloodlines bind them together. Anita convinces Rainie to become a dog with her, tying a collar of red string around each of their necks to preserve their kinship forever. But when the two girls are separated, Anita sinks into a dreamworld that only Rainie knows how to rescue her from. As Anita’s body begins to rot, it is up to Rainie to rebuild Anita’s body and keep her friend from being lost forever.

Filled with ghosts and bodily entrails, this is a story about the horror and beauty of intimacy, written in K-Ming Chang’s signature poetic and visceral lore.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Queer, Fantasy, LGBT, Magical Realism, Literary Fiction

288 pages, Paperback

First published October 24, 2023

About the author

K-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House, 2020), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Her short story collection, GODS OF WANT, is forthcoming from One World.

Reviews

[༘⋆ isabelle ༘⋆ · Rating 3 out of 5]

i got that dog (the horrors of female desire) in me

[m. · Rating 4 out of 5]

(in the most redudant of terms) this book is like my brilliant friend but for girls who think cannibalism is sexy

[Elizabeth (Plant Based Bride) · Rating 3 out of 5]

A surreal and visceral love letter to the evolution from girl to woman, and the ties that bind us inextricably together.

Full of bizarre imagery and sapphic yearning, I felt the poetic passages pulling me under into a trance. I love weird lit, but I must admit I felt confused through much of this novel. The characters and their relationships were compelling, but the line between reality and imagination was so blurred I found myself losing the thread of the narrative. This is beautifully written, but I’m not sure I understood what Chang was trying to convey.

I’d like to read more of K-Ming Chang’s work, if only for the gorgeous prose and surreal, dreamlike quality, though I must admit I find myself hoping that Chang’s future work is slightly more accessible!

“Her laughter is a season you want to stand in forever, golden leaves relinking with the trees, springtime fizzing out of a bottle. She has a dimple on either side of her smile, one lower than the other, and the asymmetry describes joy perfectly. Her smile is so radiant it makes me ashamed.” Page 17

Trigger/Content Warnings: child abuse, infant murder, institutionalizations, blood, gore, body horror, violence, corporal punishment, animal death, feces

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Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC.

[Stitching Ghost · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you know me, you probably know that I'm an absolute sucker for a very stylized prose and for weird horror, so at face value this one should have been right up my alley right? Alas, I ended up hate reading it.

Let me summarize the book, I normally don't but here I feel like the blurb is missing one core aspect of the book the fact that it's utterly obsessed with feces: Weird kid is obsessed about poop, dogs and her friend, poop, poop, poop, disjointed pointless stuff, terrible parenting, poop, someone gets their hand stitched with hair, dogs and poop, kid in coma because can't cope with other kid not being there, weird uncomfortable stuff and probably more poop.

You can only have so many excrement centric scenes before the gross factor wears out and you either get into the so over the top it's funny or into the trying too hard to be edgy territory, this one ended up in the trying too hard zone.

[Kim Lockhart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will read anything K-Ming Chang publishes. I would describe her writing as viscerally poetic, not an easy style to pull off successfully. Organ Meats is such a provocative title. I was immediately reminded of A Certain Hunger, by Chelsea G. Summers, which turned out to be a pretty good comparison, though truly nothing can compare to this novel. Nobody else can write like this.

The chapter titles are hilarious and unusually long and detailed. That's the moment I knew I would really get into this story.

The kids in this novel possess more imagination than any adults I know, and that is probably the point. When you're a kid, you can see the world around you in a million iterations, and can stretch form and function, even take on the lives of animals. Every day, kids answer the question: "What does it mean to be alive?" Also its corollary: "What will we become?"

Adults misremember childhood as a simpler time. It is not. It is when there are more possibilities than ever. It is a confusing time, full of elements kids cannot yet make sense of. In a swirling river of stimuli, it's friendship that offers a life raft of safety and support. It is through friendship that we learn how to be, how to become. Who else but children, who center themselves, could see themselves as raw and exposed to the world, as transparent as glass?

The aforementioned visceral nature of the writing is by nature, metaphorical. Gleaning precise interpretations from Chang's prose is a challenge indistinguishable from excavating poetry. Many poets write prose, and some even pen novels, but none can write as skillfully as Chang, who saturates each sentence with pure poetic depth. If one could punch their hands into the story, it would feel both tense and yielding, gelatinous and smooth, squishy and surprisingly malleable. Trying to get a handle on it is a lot like trying to nail jello to the wall. You just have to go with it.

The one thing I know absolutely for sure: the author draws and retraces, again and again, the connection among all living things. Respect for all living beings is in perfect partnership with cyclical manifestation. Since we humans have tried to ignore a connection we cannot sever, the debt we owe to other living things only grows. Until we learn to develop empathy, kinship, and regard, our collective lives will continue to deteriorate. We punish ourselves for our own obstinacy.

Chang compares women to jewels, but not in the way you might think. That perfect pearl has emerged as a result of friction, sand-blasted into being, and rough-polished by life until she shines. This story is swimming in metaphorical and fever dream imagery, leaving interpretation open to each reader. Realizations rise to the surface on their own time schedule. Anything you can imagine about the lives of women and girls most probably applies. It's hard, however, to catalogue these mini-epiphanies as they appear. Everything is so fantastical, our reactions seem kind of clinical in comparison. During one mind-blowing series, all I could come up with is that women and girls so rarely belong to themselves.

I had so many random reflections while reading this novel:

The soul of a city always ends up for sale.

Cut connections can sometimes grow back.

Ghosts connect us, but not ghosts of others, but rather ghosts of ourselves.

Some people are afraid to act, because they might not succeed, so they don't even try. The rare soul reserves fear for the feeling of awe, not the fear of harm or failure.

Chang's way of relaying and relating concepts and ideas is uncanny, like how the memory of a person resides in your bones. The author turns the familiar inside out. Beyond our understanding of change, she presents the unmaking of the self as the other side of transformation. Amazingly, and perhaps incomprehensibly, the mothers in the story believe that you can only know a person's true self when you can recognize their insides. Outward appearances can be devious. You can't dress up a kidney to look like something else.

The author presents dreams stuffed with metaphors as the expressions of the roles women and girls are told to occupy. Fertility as one's highest purpose, is stretched into a smorgasbord of earthy fecundity. It is by these exaggerations that we are pointed to the truth. How many women have been leading awake-dreaming lives, and how many of them fear breaking out of that twilight existence?

As an aside, I'm very curious about other's interpretations of every symbolic element in this novel. I think I got the gist of much of it, though I know parts of the narrative slipped past me. I still don't know what the significance of the parched earth might represent, other than the idea of two worlds: the island above the water and the world underneath it, much as the author pairs other opposites, like being awake vs. dreaming. The lack of life-sustaining rain on an island surrounded by water must represent something important.

In this story, even waiting is an action, a wide-eyed determined anticipation. The very act of waiting can influence lives and events. Before reading this novel, I always thought of waiting as a passive event. Just as the author teaches us that waiting is an action, she also proposes that sleeping is an action, not a passive event. Sleep and dreams don't happen to us; we sleep and we dream. That suggests that we have some power in our dreams, in that other world.

The level of the surreal, the ethereal, and the anthropomorphic, is simply off the charts. The most difficult part of the book for readers will most likely be when the predator and prey exchange places. But, this is all allegory, and the scene is in full symmetry with the balance of opposites so central to the story. Another very uncomfortable section, mainly for its painful truth, is the depiction of the human without mercy, one who will inflict permanent damage in an insane attempt to gain control over a bond which threatens to break. Another extremely unsettling aspect of these scenes is the concept of everything being alive, of having a history, of turning the known world upside down, of upending the rules.

Where Chang's novel Bestiary is also dynamically poetic, allegorical, and visceral, Organ Meats is a whole new level of creation. Tragedy woven through myth is more gut wrenching than any event in real life. Maybe that's because there is even less control. That characteristic makes myth the perfect vehicle for describing the worst of human traits.

If you are a fan of visceral, deep, poetry-prose, the kind that challenges your mind and by twists and turns reveals a highly original mythology, then this book is for you. It is a dizzying experience, like looking down from a great height, but one that you won't want to miss, just for the jaw-dropping level of writing alone.

Thank you to Netgalley, and to One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House, for providing an uncorrected proof of this novel for review.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

When Anita cut her palm on the chain-link fence or bit herself in the forearm playing dog, playing dawn, she bled all the way home. Her bleeding was widespread. Once, when she cut herself picking windshield glass off the street, saying she was afraid the dogs would step on it or mistake it for sugar, her blood spread itself thin as steam, a red haze floating in the air for days. But I don’t even know what her other insides are shaped like, Rainie said, looking down at the table. Vivian said, Oh, I do. I go to the butcher’s all the time with Ayi, and the organ meats are always the cheapest. Have you had breakfast yet?

I really enjoyed K-Ming Chang’s previous works — the novel Bestiary and the short story collection Gods of Want — and especially because they were just so weird; combining Taiwanese mythology with the outsider SoCal queer immigrant child experience, the weirdness seemed the perfect way for Chang to capture that jarring outsider experience. Organ Meats continues in the same vein — with the maybe-more-than-friendship of two girls metaphorically tied together over time with the threads of their belief system — but whereas the previous books combined myth and magical realism to marvellous effect, this one stretches into full-on surrealism, and I found it challenging to follow. I continue to marvel at Chang’s imagination and bravura, but I didn’t feel very much for the story or the characters: like looking at a Dalí painting, I can recognise the skill without really liking the result; and while I might say that I didn’t really like this, I’m still rounding up to four stars and will read Chang again. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

We swim in the thickest cut of shade under the sycamore, smoking a cigarette each, slobbering like the dogs we are. Dogs can see the dead — we come from generations of canines, some dogs and some not, so we know their ways, we still use our hind legs — and they aren’t as interested in the living as you think. And we see the two girls, Anita Hsia and Rainie Tsai, red threads knotted at the plum of their throats, sitting together on the blanched roots of the sycamore, and we know after this summer they will never see each other again, not as daughters and dogs, and that only one of them knows this, the smarter one, Rainie, though both their mothers are fools, naming their daughters after singers, one of whom died early, and we know exactly the kind of woman who names her daughter in front of a TV screen or while dancing in the dark to nothing, and Rainie at least is better at belonging to her loneliness, inhabiting it like a house, ornamenting it with narratives of how she came to live inside it, her mother at work, her brothers out all night snipping the ears off dogs, her best friend belonging to a sycamore tree.

Anita and Rainie are ten years old, and at Anita’s insistence, have knotted red threads around their throats in order to tie themselves together, like dogs, for life. They spend their time interacting with a group of woman-faced stray dogs that laze between the roots of a dying sycamore tree in an otherwise empty lot, and if the day gets too hot in their parched urban environment, the girls will take off their clothes and stretch out on the concrete floor of the pesticide-filled garage on Rainie’s side of the duplex their families share. Through stories from their mothers and interviews with the dogs, the girls (and the reader) learn where they (and the not-quite-canine) dogs came from, and with pages filled with banana ghosts, pearls, feces, and red thread, a messy history and a mythology are invented for this pair. But when Rainie’s family moves away — mostly to get away from her friend’s strange influence — Anita loses herself in that mythology, and it will take Rainie a decade to follow the thread back to her lost friend.

As with her previous works, I enjoyed Chang’s strange metaphors in Organ Meats, as with: They tried to cut the thicket of hair off her skull, though the blade bent against her strands. Her hair had the tensile strength of time. and The moon dragged its tassels of light, licking the windows bright. But, as I wrote above, this stretches into surrealism and I was never quite sure what I was meant to take literally, as in:

Look, Abu said, scraping at the plaster walls of our house with her nails. Beneath the first layer was flesh. The wall licked her hand and gloved it in slobber. I pressed my hand to the opposite wall and felt it pulse and flex like a belly, and beneath it I could feel the snaking of intestines and the drumbeat of a tongue as the house swallowed and swallowed around us. One day when the plaster collapses like a broken wing and the wood beams rescind into the dirt, the house will finally succeed in digesting us, returning to its first life, lifting our beds like tongues and drooling all over our bones until we glow.

And I found the surrealism distancing: I don’t really understand what happened to Anita after Rainie left (what is written could be a metaphor for just about anything), and as the friendship seemed less important to Rainie, her return a decade later didn’t provide any emotional catharsis to me:

What she felt for Anita ran through the ground, beneath her feet, like those dogs racing on the underside of the pavement, erupting through a rain puddle. She wanted all the miracles of being near her. All the births she beckoned. I’ve chosen, was all Rainie said.

And yet: the banana ghosts and the woman-faced dogs and the bunks full of oyster shuckers on the underside of the home island give a sense of the pressures faced by Taiwanese women that might be hard to convey in a straightforward narrative, and I recognise the artistic skill that Chang has brought to bear here. I just wish that more happened on the page to make me understand and care about Anita and Rainie; I felt distanced and unconnected throughout. Still four stars.

[Kathleen · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was a clusterfuck of poop and dogs. I can't tell if it was trying to be clever and these are all metaphors but boy you would have to be really intoxicated to draw anything meaningful out of this.

[Clara Levi · Rating 1 out of 5]

Grotesque metaphors threaded loosely around a story, no pay off.

[Stacy (Gotham City Librarian) · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read, and that’s saying something. I was going to shelve it at first, because I didn’t think I’d have the focus required for such an experimental novel right now, but I didn’t want to give up on it so I gave it another shot. I’m certainly not opposed to surrealist fiction and I enjoy it on occasion. (“Fever Dream” comes to mind.) The more I read, the easier it was to vibe with. Like a strong alcoholic drink with exotic flavors you aren’t used to, but after a few sips you start to feel it. I actually read this a couple of months ago, but per the publisher's request I waited until two weeks before publication to post my thoughts.

Most of the other reviews for this book say that it was difficult to understand what was going on, and I agree. There were times when the writing seemed like it was on the verge of accomplishing something very poetic and other times where I felt like I was wasting my own time reading paragraphs of nonsense. (A specific example would be when the stray dogs were “speaking” to the girls in a sort stream of consciousness interview format.)

I won’t sugarcoat it: this book is gross. “Visceral” is definitely a good word for it. Among other things, there’s a lot of talk about feces, specifically and gross imagery in general. If you really love dogs, maybe don’t read this. There are vivid descriptions of stray dogs suffering in various ways and surreal depictions of dogs giving birth to human babies, etc. This is one of those books that you can smell, and not in a good way. There’s even a family legend at one point that involves many girls collectively trying to fart into a river to remove its reflective surface. There’s so much content involving bodily substances that it almost feels gratuitous rather than purposeful.

I might be an outlier here, but Anita’s love for Rainie felt a bit abusive and possessive to me. I won’t elaborate for the sake of spoilers, but it seemed like a strange relationship to glorify.

There WERE full chapters in the book that I enjoyed. Anything involving dreams, all the weird stuff with Rainie’s “dogtooth,” and the ending. There were many beautifully crafted sentences scattered throughout. I think this author absolutely has talent and writes from a unique perspective. I’m glad that I gave this a second chance, but it was a bit of a challenge to read overall and took a lot of concentration.

Thank you to Netgalley for giving me the chance to read this ARC before publication!

Trigger Warnings: animal violence/death, bodily fluids/substances

[Trevor Abbott · Rating 1 out of 5]

Paws-itively awful!

DNF

[sophie]

dnf @ 50%, i was really excited for this one but the writing is just insufferable and it doesn't get better. overwritten, pretentious, a real slog to read. :(

[laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

i couldn’t put this down and now i’ve finished it i feel empty

[Jefferson Williams · Rating 3 out of 5]

there are two dogs inside you: one is the pain of womanhood, the other has been in a coma for a decade

[lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my first K-Ming Chang novel and I wish I read her first two works first. I read in the acknowledgements that this is the last piece of her mythical triptych and I think I would have appreciated this book better if I read these books in order of Bestiary, Gods of Want, and lastly Organ Meats. This is also my first surrealist book and had no idea what to expect. To be honest, I was confused most of the time, I wasn't sure if things are literal or metaphorical. One thing is for sure though, K-Ming Chang is a good writer. I love her prose, I don't know how she made dog spit, feces, and other human and animal secretions sound beautiful, it's honestly mesmerizing. As for the themes, there is so much to unpack. I think I need to let this simmer and ruminate on the themes more. I merely scratched the surface on female bodily autonomy and freedom. This deserves a reread and I think I'm going to read her first two books first. I'll edit this review once I've let this one sit and have my thoughts in order.

It currently sits at 3.5 but I might bump it up once I get a proper reading of the book.

Thanks to Netgalley and One World for the arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Reilly Zimbric · Rating 2 out of 5]

She’s got that dog in her.

[SL · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am soooo anita coded, k-ming chang wrote this for me

--
“The red thread I tied around her neck must have replaced her original bloodline with my own, confusing our fates.”

Best friends Anita & Rainie find refuge in an old sycamore tree where they meet a group of stray dogs who can talk to humans. The girls learn that they’re preceded by generations of dog-headed women and woman-headed dogs whose bloodlines bind them together. To keep this bond, Anita convinces Rainie to become a dog with her, tying a red string around their necks. But when they become separated, Anita sinks into the dream world that only Rainie can rescue her from.

Call me delulu, but this book was written FOR ME. I am so Anita-coded. Born in a dog year, I was
obsessed with them as a child, to the point where I wanted to grow up to be one (my mother told me I couldn’t and I was eternally devastated. so I stayed human). Dogs play an important role in Organ Meats and other media, always circling back to concept of loyalty. It’s something that intrigues me, too–I think I’m loyal but I also wonder if I’m fickle because of my ease at detaching. Sorry this is meant to be a review and not a therapy session.

A part of the triptych by Chang, Organ Meats circles around the same theme: ancestry, womanhood, ghosts, bonds, hunger, water, and the grotesque. Chang is never afraid to get nasty.

But bonds and what bounds us supersedes all else. I intimately understand Anita because I want what she wants–what does it mean to bind yourself to another, to entwine fates together, to confuse one another? What does it mean to be buried with you, to hunger for you forever? Rainie doesn’t desire in the same way as Anita and strangely Rainie feels like every person that I’ve pursued in my life. ‘I want to scar you so we’ll have to meet again’??? GIRL UR SO UNHINGED BUT I GET IT.

Anita, who “loves the stories of being bound” and Rainie, “longing isn’t enough to bring me to you.” My teeth aches thinking of them.

At the heart, this book is about intimacy and love–the beauty, terror, and viscera of it. Also I am sorry if you were expecting a coherent book review and all you got was a diary entry. I think you should just read it.

Another line to entice you: “Your sister is his wife but you are his knife.”

[Olga :)) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Finished the book, however I had to force myself through it.

"Organ meats" seems to wander around many topics but never gets to the core of any. The images are disjointed, even disorienting, but Chang seems to create that purposefully, a map of vague emotions and fragments rather than a concrete book, which is not what I was looking forward to. Or perhaps Chang was herself unsure of what the story is about? K-Ming Chang’s prose just doesn’t seem to be for the reader. I was confused throughout and was hoping for something where I wouldn't have to force myself to read it. It seems like this book was written without any strong intent.

[Eva Gachus · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once the dog bit shit out of her ass, it was all downhill from there. K-ming had a style much too difficult to enjoy.

[Mallory Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lyrical, visceral, gorgeous, biting, furious, compelling. Such a gorgeous story packed with folklore and queer desire!

[cap · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars
if k-ming chang has no rabid bitches, then i’m dead
---

organ meats is the story of the love between taiwanese-american women, ancestral or familial or sapphic or otherwise, overcoming and redeeming their history, living on in a sometimes indifferent, sometimes hostile, always absurd world, by means of the care and community and love they find in each other. and i think that's beautiful.

so many literary books nowadays, especially by male authors, seem to be about denying feelings, or not speaking them — coming at them obliquely, like shadows the narration wants to skip over. suppression, repression, show-don’t-tell, whatever you want to call it — the characters, the authors, everyone wants to give away less. every author wants to tell a story to make you feel things, but they want to do it subtly, under the surface of the narrative, like a magic trick where you’re focused on your settings and the happenings around you until, oh no, look at that, your heart hurts and you want to cry. they want to wrench your feelings out of you without your notice. 

k-ming chang's writing does the exact opposite. her grotesque surrealism bursts everything open, leaving a mess of blood and guts and bodily fluids for her audience to puzzle over, every un-beautiful intricacy of intimacy and family and love and human bodies exposed. she makes the bizarre and the repellent compelling, pulls you in closer when your instinct is to look away. there are dogs with women’s heads, undersea cities, ghosts that live inside banana trees and grant wishes, teeth that end up in places they really shouldn’t, even one memorable instance of cunnilingus on a tree (yes, you read that right). it is obscene, it is disgusting, it is visceral and funny and ridiculous. chang’s prose vibrate with intensity and poetry, almost every line with some brilliant metaphor or turn of phrase that may or may not turn out to be literal. for example, i’m just flipping to a random page here: 

Along the trail, trees wilted beneath the weight of fog. The understory, the dendrologist said, is here. She kneeled on the side of the trail, grasping Rainie’s wrist and pressing her hand against a sapling, its roots aboveground like uncoiled rope, its back a bastardized version of skin, pored and hairless but with risen seams, patches of bark sewn together by lines of ants (p. 166).

 
to read feeling like every small detail is both significant and insignificant, real and metaphorical — eventually the reader comes to realize that, in chang’s work, there is no difference between these things. the characters are living inside the metaphor — the entire book is metaphorical. it becomes easier after that, though no less shocking, somehow.

it is a fine tightrope to walk — this style could easily come across as just your weirdest friend telling you about their weirdest, most disturbing LSD trip — but it is steadied by the heart that carries through all of chang’s works: the earthly love (and conflicts) between women, mothers and daughters, ancestors and cousins, friends and lovers. by pressing up close to the most base, animal components of bodies and relationships, chang is able to keep her narrative grounded to concreteness, while also exploring the bounds of these characters' ties — how far will they go to keep each other? to escape the past, or to honor it? what will they inflict on each other, and what will they subject themselves to on each other’s behalves? usually, in chang’s works, the answer is anything, to any length, no matter how disgusting, how time-consuming or difficult or painful. and that is what keeps me coming back, even when i find myself challenged by chang's stylistic and narrative choices, which always seem to find a way to push farther into weirdness and can feel overwhelming at times.

coming into this novel, i was unsure of the dogs — sometimes dog-headed women or woman-headed dogs, but mostly stray street dogs — who both are and are not the spirits of rainie and anita's female ancestors. i thought they might feel extraneous to the narrative, like intruders on anita and rainie's relationship; i was completely wrong. the dogs are the carriers of rainie and anita's indigenous taiwanese heritage, and they are absolutely integral to all the characters' lives. through them, the ghosts of their ancestors are still here, sometimes guiding, sometimes biting; through them, we hear the voices of generations, their anecdotes and digressions and braggadocio; we encounter all the complications of oral histories and family histories, lies and conflicting narratives, layers of truth braided with myth and exaggeration. by becoming dogs themselves, anita and rainie step into the skins of their heritage, reclaiming the beauty and bloodiness of indigenous history while acknowledging what has been lost. yet the most important part is always the love — as k-ming chang mythologizes the gritty and backbreaking lives of her lower- and working-class women-dogs, she locates the essence of love in what they do for each other, the pains they endure and the hands they work to the bone for their daughters. in k-ming chang's world, the animal concreteness of bodies (and their many excretions) is part and parcel of unabstracted love: love is in the touch and strike, as well as the bite; the actions taken and choices made that shape lives; the messes cleaned and prices paid. the dogs are a reminder of the love the characters' ancestors bore each other, and the love they still bear for their daughters, that they will carry with them as long as they live, wherever they go, and one day join in.

and speaking of love — i can't believe i've gotten this far into a review without talking about rainie and anita's relationship, the beating heart of the story (sometimes literally lol). every reviewer seems to compare them to elena ferrante's my brilliant friend, which i haven't read, and now apparently need to, because it seems like the ur example of the trope of two toxic, codependent female best friends who grow up together and who may or may not be in love with each other. and aside from being, like, story of my life, that is basically what rainie and anita are like. under anita's direction, the two of them tie themselves collars with red thread (which, if you're asian or also have just read a lot of fanfiction, you'll understand as fucking adorable) and pretend to be dogs with the strays that frequent the neighborhood sycamore, their ancestors. the girls have the kind of relationship that is so entwined and all-encompassing it almost certainly looks unhealthy from the outside, but it feels like ecstasy when you're inside it, so you don't really care and you'll do anything the other asks of you. it is a push and pull — anita always pulling closer, wanting more, rainie pushing to keep herself separate but allowing anita to lead, so long as it doesn't cost her anything. i see the two of them as embodying the inner conflict of any intimate relationship, the yearning for connection and inseparability standing in opposition to the fear of exposure and vulnerability, anita's unending thirst to be loved wrestling with rainie's desire for independence and individuality. and then rainie's mother, who is afraid of the girls' red-threaded bond, moves her family away; and at the moment of truth, rainie lets go without a fight. listening to this on audiobook just broke me:

Conserve letters say u not you y not why
You conserve letters you're writing over me
No
Why Y Why
I don't know I have to follow my family I have to u heard the dogs, didn't u? Mama is afraid of the thread on my neck
Follow me
Cant
I will wait for u and every name you go by
Bye good night I have to sleep
No Don't go yet please dog Rainie wait Okay Dream me? (p.90)

anita promises to scar rainie in order to find her again, but rainie leaves behind all of anita's gifts of fossils, and anita falls into a decade-long coma where she dreams the stories of her many mothers (she has three). until the day rainie is called back by the dogs to rebuild anita's body, and in the freedom of adulthood, she is able to make the choice to surrender to, and fight for, her fated love.

what i adore about these two is that their love is a source of salvation and liberation, not destruction. too often stories of all-encompassing queer love (looking at you, portrait of a lady on fire) are tragic; and the stories i've read of ~best friends~ like this — yiyun li's book of goose comes to mind — always seem to end in either a fizzle and a separation or in mutual destruction. by contrast, this book shows rainie and anita finding each other again after the fizzle of their separation, and loving each other again. or still. it feels like an epilogue to all those other stories, one that says: yes, actually, they found each other again, with the endorsement and help (or herding) of their families (in the form of dogs); and they saved and remade and sacrificed for one another, to hold on to what they had, because it was precious; and in the end they lived happily ever after together. i guess i'm a romantic, because i much prefer this:

Maybe you'll regret waiting, Vivian said. Who knows what she's become in her sleep? Who knows who she'll be when she wakes? She'll always be in my blood. As long as she's still got any. But she might not be the dog you remember or who remembers you.

It was a risk, Rainie knew, and she generally avoided those. She wanted a world where she could be weightless. But Anita multiplied her, duplicating their human lives into dog lives, their dog lives into dream lives. They had been together for so many species. Meeting again as strangers would only mean another life together. Then I'll choose her again, Rainie said. I'll choose to know her. As many times as I can.

Vivian bent her head, dragging her toe through her shadow, smearing it thin. It's not too late. You could still stop now. You could go the same way you left before. So easily, and without leaving behind even a shit. Who could blame you?

I would, Rainie said. What she felt for Anita ran through the ground, beneath her feet, like those dogs racing on the underside of the pavement, erupting through a rain puddle. She wanted all the miracles of being near her. All the births she beckoned.

I've chosen, was all Rainie said (p.225-26).

so what if it's toxic? sometimes all a girl wants is to know and be known by their best friend so wholly that it's like you're the same person; to disappear into the greater being that is the two of you together, that fertile waiting space of possibility and intimacy and safety and total devotion, and stay there forever. it makes my heart feel happy. and if it's not possible in real life, then i'll take it in literary form any day. thank you for always delivering, k-ming <3 (except about the vore thing, idk if i'll ever forgive the fact that that's a thing i now understand 💀)

p.s. the audiobook reading is just pure perfection — both rainie and anita’s readers capture the characters’ voices perfectly, and their performances give so much life and humanity to the story

[Emily Coffee and Commentary · Rating 2 out of 5]

A visceral fever dream of the intensity of female friendship and the terrifying experience of growing older. Utterly unique and filled with imagery equally parts repulsive and enchanting, Organ Meats is a journey into a bond so deep that it transcends language, dreams and visions so moving that they effect reality, and the tracings of ancestors who pass down their pain, their urges, their tie to the primordial down to daughters who live and love with the unabashed vigor and loyalty that is seldom seen in modern day. Filled with mythology, folklore, and the magic that slithers just behind closed eyes and eager minds, this novel is an unforgettable coming of age that unapologetically explores the parts of girlhood that do not align with convention, with societal standards.

[Aubrei K (earlgreypls)]

“The center of summer, soft with rot, Rainie and I decide to be dogs.”


Organ Meats is about two young girls (who are descended from dogs) and their complicated relationship.

From the description alone I knew this would be strange (and I love strange) but I didn’t realize it was surrealism- and it ended being too strange for me. There was so much beauty in the imagery while at the same time a lot of disturbing content, and that juxtaposition was compelling.

However, I gotta be honest and say I had no clue what was going on for most of the book. You probably aren’t supposed to (?) but so often I felt like I was reading gibberish.

This is not to say the writing wasn’t incredible - because even though it wasn’t fully for me I can see the artistry. There were stretches where I would feel like I had a hold on the characters or the story, then I would quickly feel like I was in a maze. I’m sure this disorientation was intentional, but I can’t say it made for the most enjoyable reading experience.

I have not read anything else by this author yet and didn’t realize this book is connected to Bestiary and Gods of Want. If I had, I definitely would have read those first.

Organ Meats is an incredibly unique piece of surrealist fiction that explores female friendship, companionship, mother daughter relationships, girlhood, freedom, and grief. It was not my favorite just because of my lack of understanding of what was going on, but I’d definitely recommend trying it!

”I go to sleep with my ponytail or two of my braids gripped in my fist so I’ll have a tether to hold on to, a self to come back to. But I’d let go if it means reaching you.”

*Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the free ARC in exchange for an honest review*

[Maya Sophia · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's weird and then there's weird.

This book is not without its flaws. There were times when I genuinely didn't know what was going on, but then there were others where it kind of flowed and the writing was really interesting and I understood the internal logic in as far as it could be understood.

In general, I'd say reading this was like looking at a piece of high art and not understanding a bit of it, but appreciating how interesting it is and the craftsmanship required to produce it.

[endrju · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spooky October #10

The last entry for the Spooky October season. It isn't as much horror as it is a viscous mix of Apichatpong Weerasethakul's cinematic willful hermeticism and Can Xue's deranged dissolution of all borders and boundaries. Admittedly, I just described pure horror for some, though I mostly felt while not exactly stuck but trying to pull myself through the narrative that kept resisting my attempts at comprehension. It is sometimes very funny though:

Our door god is an electronic Santa Claus that hula-hoops his hips when you press a button on this butt. He dances frantically, like his bones are fish, and he says, Ho ho ho ho ho ho. When Abu watered him with her hose, his hips short-circuited and he bent at the knees in prayer, his song reversing Oh oh oh oh oh oh.

It makes me chuckle every time I read it.

[traumatized man · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was really fucking strange and weird and that's Mainly why I love it



I tend to love strange and out of worldly things that make you think of something from a different perspective and books you never think that you would find never think that you would find another messed up mind that could write something so horrific but yet be so fun in the process.

Also this book weirdly explained the friendship that I have with my best friend This is what would happen if we were dog-headed women I guess.

[Morgan Dante · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lush, queer, brutal, surreal, fabulist. While the prose is dreamy and lovely, and the story relies on mythology, I adore just how unafraid this book is; it's not shy about bodily fluids or the deep, codependent bond between two best friends who decide to become dogs and are bonded by a red string of fate. Also, love seeing a bit of Frankenstein thrown in there.

Thank you to One World for the ARC!

[Shanna Gauvin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sad to DNF at 60% but I just can’t read another description of dog poop.

[KowaiMangl · Rating 4 out of 5]

What in the crazy fever dream ahh type book was this?? And why did I lowkey love it?? 😂

[Bri · Rating 4 out of 5]

weird as hell but im rocking with it!!!!! i love seeing love described as something voracious and all-consuming and dangerous and the concept of loving someone so hard you want to wound them had me locked in. the language is very intense and ornate and even though i did have to go back and be like “hey what?” I loved it!

[grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was really good! I was talking to someone about how I really enjoyed watching Yellowjackets the TV show and they told me that I would like reading this book which turned out to be very very true. K-Ming Chang writes so enchantingly and I can totally see how people may think that it's 'pretentious' but honestly I felt like it was so delectable I wanted to sink my teeth into it. Anyways Organ Meats is like if you and that one friend from middle school who you drifted away from but think about all the time tied yourselves to each other and thinking about them is soul crushing and cannibalism as a metaphor for love (Yellowjackets!!!!!). anyways if anyone has book recs like this give them to me!