Heartbreaker Stories

by Maryse Meijer

In her debut story collection, Heartbreaker, Maryse Meijer, flashlight in hand, goes deep into the darkest rooms of the psyche. With gorgeously restrained and exacting prose that packs a cumulatively devastating punch, she unapologetically unmasks the violence we are willing to perform upon one another in the name of love and loneliness and the unremitting desire to survive. In doing so, she lights societal convention and reader expectation on fire, exploring the darker emotional truths surrounding love and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Horror, Literary Fiction, Short Story Collection, Literature

193 pages, Paperback

First published July 12, 2016

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 5 out of 5]

Exquisite damage. This book was too short.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding collection. Usually, I like to take breaks between reading short stories in order to reset, but I devoured this in only a few hours. Part of it was the strongly established vibe of uneasiness bleeding from one story to the next. Meijer shines glaring floodlights on the desires and the troubles of the losers, the loners, the invisible. Taut plotting and natural dialogue combine in projecting that elusive not-quite-horror-but-close feel that is so difficult to maintain effectively. Tropes are upended; stereotypes are reversed: the unexpected becomes expected.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great thing about short stories is how you can read one in a sitting for one mood, then another one, and then by the end of the book you have a stained window of moods inside you. This this more of a paper bag full of busted shards. It does bodily violence without the precious weight those scenes sometimes get.

[Portal in the Pages · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning

[Carmen]

This cover, though.

[Mike Thorn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Listen to the Craftwork interview with Maryse Meijer.

Maryse Meijer references Kathe Koja's influence in the Acknowledgments page of Heartbreaker, and I can see the throughline: like many of Koja's novels and stories, the pieces in Heartbreaker often see characters scrabbling at transcendence or the ineffable via intense corporeal experience. Meijer masterfully withholds conventional aspects of "motivation" and "backstory" to amplify her fiction's unease and moral inscrutability, but it's impossible to miss the profound existential pain underlying all that mystique. This book evades tidy genre categorization, but in terms of affect and philosophical fixations it certainly shares horror's air. Whatever you want to call it, it's one of the most exciting fiction debuts of the past decade or so.

[Phee · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some very twisted stories in here and they were delightful.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not a usual fan of short stories, but these stories were so wildly perverse, so darkly disturbing, they alternated from erotic to nauseating between each page. And I couldn't put it down.

Excellent book, but not for everyone.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stark, savage, no fucks given.

[Rachel León]

I feel like I've read more short stories this year than ever before and I see stories that overlap in theme or style with other writers, but this collection feels very original. Some of the stories are weird, others dark, but they're all fantastic. I'm excited to read more of Maryse Meijer's work.

[jenni · Rating 2 out of 5]

i think i sort of hate what just happened here

[Marko · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pozamašna četvorka za ovu bizarnu (i na trenutke - uznemirujuću!) zbirku kratkih priča.

[Lu Louche · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of short stories by Maryse Meijer is, broadly speaking, about love and desire and always includes a moment of heartbreak. The 13 stories are different, strange, maybe even bewildering at times. The unusualness of the relationships/desires makes it interesting. But not because you finally get to know how a girl and a fox make out but because it opens up a different way of telling a love story, it allows Maryse to use a different kind of language then you would in a more traditional love story. But since it is still a love story you can refer the words and feeling she conveys back to yourself. At least in theory, I couldn’t make it work every time – sue me. Sometimes she makes good use of this opportunity, writing beautiful analogies. But with most short story collection some are better than others.

The heartbreaks that occurred sometimes kept me longing for more. For a more drastic or devastating even if you will. It is not that there subtlety was a bad thing. One the one hand I really liked how she ended fire for example. It was well written and played on the whole story but at the same time I wanted the character to burn in the fire, to be consumed by it, consumed by love.

[Jessica Sullivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I typically like short stories to have more closure, but the ones in this collection are so jarring, bizarre and sordid that I didn't even care. They're a punch to the gut, like pouring salt into the open wounds of loneliness, melancholy, longing and disconnection.

David Foster Wallace said that "good fiction's job is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable." I'll let you guess what Heartbreaker did for me.

[♑︎♑︎♑︎ ♑︎♑︎♑︎ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found these stories a little tentative. A polite perversity to them. I wanted the author to dare to disturb me more than she did. For the subject matter--which ranges from violence, to sexual violence, to simple estrangement between characters who haven't learned even the basics of surviving in a social culture--the author stayed relatively restrained. I hope she breaks out next time because her territory should be one of primal screams, not primal excuse-me's.

[Kathe Koja · Rating 4 out of 5]

In contemporary fiction, it doesn't get any wilder, starker, or more beautifully subtle than Maryse Meijer's work. HEARTBREAKER is thirteen stories, is a singular worldview, is a dark, intelligent, heart-stopping romp through the very human condition, its women and men on fire, lost, in love with so much that will not love them back. Until it does. And then look out . . . You won't read anything like this from anyone else, and in my book there's no higher praise.

[Cody | CodysBookshelf · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unyieldingly weird and incisive collection that cut me deep and didn’t let up: Heartbreaker is one of my new favorite story collections. Almost shockingly consistent, this is a book chock full of pieces unafraid to embrace their strangeness and often offer poignant takes on the human condition.

My favorites are the title story, which features a tense, sexual relationship between a developmentally challenged boy and a poverty-stricken, sexually anguished girl; “The Daddy”, about a married woman who hires a younger man to play the role of her father; and “Jailbait”, a portrait of the breakdown of a man’s modern relationship after he spends a night in jail.

At the heart of each of these stories is some form of loneliness, of alienation, with characters yearning for something—something more, something different. The author nails true yearning, desire, in pitch-perfect prose. I will certainly read her other books.

[ChelseaRenee Lovell · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars, beautifully written, I absolutely love her work! I liked Rag more, but this collection of short stories was definitely still engaging and a great read. I would definitely say that if you have literally any sort of trigger that you should maybe think twice before reading this!! Meijer is probably one of my new favorite authors when it comes to short stories, but her content is some of the more heavy and dark stuff I think I’ve ever read. I didn’t give it five stars because of this, I love super dark stuff and even I was a little uncomfortable reading a few of the stories.

[r. fay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unbelievable. Meijer is doing stuff I've truly never seen before. Every story is so affecting, so emotional, and so scary???!!!!! It's such a brilliant foil to her more recent collection RAG. Meijer has developed a distinct style that seeps into my brain like breathing in smog. Her prose is unassuming but wildly impactful. It sneaks up behind you and then punches you in your gut. I'm obsessed. Can't wait to read her novel. I am a massive fan and can't wait to follow her writing career.

[Kaya · Rating 2 out of 5]

I dragged this one out over two months because I was too stubborn to add another book to my DNF pile. This collection of short stories is not my kind of weird (Craigslist, pedophiles, girl rising from the dead, feral children) and I wasn't feeling Mejier’s “restrained and exacting prose.”

[Geertje · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories were wicked fun. They were a little dirty, a little fucked up, yet very easy to read. Meijer has a pleasant writing style. I'd love to read her debut novel The Seventh Mansion soon!

[Michelle Hart · Rating 2 out of 5]

in lieu of a 'review' i will just post short summaries of what these stories are about:

1. there's a story here about a girl with an insatiable kidnapping fantasy
2. there's a story here about a teenage girl who sexually preys on a boy with down syndrome
3. there's a story here about a girl who was raped and then torments a group of boys trying to flirt with her
4. there's a story here about a wife who can only be with her husband if he is incarcerated, and gets mad at him when she discovers he has been lying about being raped in prison
5. there's a story here about a woman who solicits a man to be her 'daddy'--not in the sexual way, but in the 'coddle me and buy me ice cream' way (this was my favorite story in the collection, guess i'm weird)
6. there's a story here about a young girl who stalks a female shopkeeper (not sure why)
7. there're also a couple 'magical realism' stories, of which i read a few pages and then stopped

if this sounds like your bag, then by all means. i spent a lot of time after i finished this thinking about why i didn't like it. the book screams 'EDGY.' see, girls are weird assholes, too! there's certainly value in that idea, but when all is said and done, it feels like just and idea. none of these characters feel like human beings; the stories feel less like stories and more like exercises.

[Elaina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have a feeling these stories will stay with me for a long time. I adored this collection, for me it was reminiscent of Sarah Hall's The Beautiful Indifference or Laura van den Berg's stories, a few of them maybe even reminded me of some of Jenny Diski's stories collected in The Vanishing Princess, less for their style and more for the way Meijer invites readers to see her characters in incredibly vulnerable, odd and dark situations. Truly, be prepared to have your heart broken.

[Paris (parisperusing) · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars (with a considerable push near 4.75): While I didn't like, or rather understand, every story in this collection, that wouldn't obstruct me from recommending it to someone with equally fucked up reading interests as myself. Meijer's writing is electrifying, provocative, disarming--if you're fortunate enough to survive its magnitude, then you're one of the lucky ones.

[ems · Rating 3 out of 5]

i liked a few of these a lot. but the rest seemed to be in the 'plot, character, narrative ... whatever. make your story as strange as possible & no one will be able to tell if it's good or bad' mold. (is it just me or does it seems like there are more and more short story collections that are like this ...?)

[casey · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few stories were interesting and I can appreciate how out of bounds/weird this book got but I just didn’t really enjoy reading it.. I also think i may be too pea-brained for this one if i’m being honest lmao

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"What do you care, I say, and then he looks at me sort of funny and says I *do* care, and I don't say anything back, just eat another burrito."

[Deanna · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not at all what I thought this was going to be. It was a challenge to even finish it. Felt like the author was just going for the shock factor

[Erika Lynn (shelf.inspiration) · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 Stars

See more on my Bookstagram: Shelf.Inspiration Instagram

This is a short story collection by author Maryse Meijer. In this collection; Meijer peels back the crust of normalcy and convention, unmasking the fury and violence we are willing to inflict in the name of love and loneliness. Her characters are a strange ensemble- a feral child, a girl raised from the dead, a possible pedophile- who share vulnerability and heartache, but maintain an unremitting will to survive. These stories deal with desire and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood, crafting a landscape of appetites threatening to self-destruct.

Ever since I read Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection (Her Body and Other Parties) I have been trying to find other short story collections that are a bit on the bizarre and thought-provoking side. So when I heard about Maryse Meijer, I knew I wanted to read her stories and see if they had a similar vibe. I’m happy to report that they do! This short story collection is so bizarre but it is about the overall feelings of love and loneliness. How these themes are shown is so creative and some almost have a magical realism or speculative to them. Each story is fairly short and most of them are slightly ambiguous, but this leaves so much room for thought-provoking speculation. While the majority of the stories are on the darker side, these stories highlight so many themes that are familiar to the human experience in such unique ways. I can’t wait to read more of Maryse Meijer’s collections!

[Kaitlyn Ahrweiler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of short stories is not for the faint of heart. It’s weird, it’s provocative, it’s uncomfortable. There are themes of self harm, pedophelia, assault, etc. But what makes it so good is the element of mystery in each story. You have no background or concrete ending. Each story leaves you with more questions, but in an addictive way. It is hard to provide little to no context and make it work, but this author does just that.