Slug And Other Stories

Slug and Other Stories mixes pop culture, Greek myth, queer feminism, and childhood nostalgia into a gory and gorgeous mess. I got my hands dirty digging into Megan Milks's sanguine collection of short stories. This prose oozes. This prose dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milks can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable. --Amber Dawn, author of Sub Rosa These stories are pure force: they norm deviance, make violence effulgent, ungender and regender sexualities. Each story is a kitsch throwback to back in the day when reading was a fun choose your own adventure, or, these stories are not just carnal, not just animalistic, not just girly: they're amphibian, our full corporeal tenderized to satisfaction, which is to say--hot. --Lily Hoang, author of Unfinished Genre conventions are commonly thought of as restrictive rules, but in these stories Megan Milks shows that these conventions can be agents of perversion, both glaringly porous and ridiculously invasive. Over the course of the book, Milks invokes and employs the genre conventions of fan fiction on, for example, Kafka's Metamorphosis and teen comedies, then mixes in young adult novels, video games, choose-your-own adventure tales, epistolary novels, gothic tales, family romances, and traumarama entries, until this melee of genres interrupt each other, parasite each other, distort each other. The result of this romp is absurd, grotesque, parapornographic, violent, gurlesque, but most of all hilarious in a dead-pan kind of way. --Johannes Goeransson, author of Haute Surveillance Wittig's Lesbian Body goes superfreak in this celebration of excess, this inquiry into boundarylessness, this exercise in genre-fuck, this slug-and/or-be-slugged fest. In a collection whose voices range from hard-boiled to hyperbolic to hysterical, Milks seriously probes the implications of social constructionism: we've made a monster (albeit sometimes hot, albeit sometimes queer) of the sexed body, individual and politic. Somehow, happily, Milks keep it comic too. Lots of parts and effluvia, no gratuitous grossness! --Alexandra Chasin, author of Brief Megan Milks's collection is a fearless romp through the post-avant wasteland of fictions both Lynchian and Homeric. Milks puts Shelley Jackson's The Melancholy of Anatomy through a cement mixer, grinding out tales as sure to delight as they radically defamiliarize. Here, Sweet Valley Twins gets a reboot finally worthy of the world their YA books helped to make weird. Milks is a master of the absurd grotesque, and Slug and Other stories is their powerful annunciation. --Davis Schneiderman, author of Multifesto