Critically acclaimed novelist and short story writer K-Ming Chang's Organ Meats follows two girls bound by ties of loyalty, brutality, and longing. Growing up as neighbors, Anita and Rainie pledge themselves to each other by embracing what they see as their heritage: to become dogs who connect themselves with collars of red thread so they will never be apart. But when Rainie's mother tries to sever that connection and Anita falls into a comatose mental state for years, Rainie becomes determined to rescue her friend from her own rotting body--by any means possible.
Chang's writing is as brutal as it is lyrical, never shying away from the beauty of the grotesque. In describing the cementing of Rainie and Anita's bond in the face of the stray dogs they've chosen as their companions, she writes how "[a]bove us, the spit is weaving itself into a silver chandelier, spattering the wall as it swings with our breath." These tenuous moments of suspension recur in Chang's text, emphasizing the thrilling yet precarious tensions of girlhood that intensify the alluring and sometimes toxic female friendships made along the way. And while the fantastical elements of Chang's story give the novel a feverish, dreamlike atmosphere, her relentlessly embodied descriptions ground readers' experience. As Anita and Rainie search for answers in trees, the flesh of dogs, the stories passed down and warped by years and fears, and each other, Chang (Gods of Want; Bestiary) weaves a tapestry of bodies and dreams, fantastical desires, and viscerally material fears. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor