Description:
"Kill Marguerite and Other Stories" collects thirteen risk-taking stories obsessed with crossing boundaries, whether formal or corporeal. Narrative genres are giddily mongrelized: the Sweet Valley twins get stuck in a choose-your-own-adventure story; Mean Girls-like violence gets embedded within a classic video game. Protagonists cycle through a series of startling, sometimes violent, changes in gender, physiology, and even species, occasionally blurring into other characters or swapping identities entirely. One woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and a Greek god impregnates a man s thigh with a sword. More than just a straightforward celebration of the carnivalesque, though, these fictions are deeply engaged, both critically and politically, with the ways that social power operates on, and through, queer bodies.
"
Review Quotes:
"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" and "Kissed By"
"Megan Milks' debut collection, "Kill Marguerite," 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 High" gets a reboot finally worthy of the world their children's books helped to make weird. Milks is a master of the absurd grotesque, and "Kill Marguerite" is her powerful annunciation."
--Davis Schneiderman, author of "Drain," "Blank," and "[SIC] Ink."
"Genre conventions are commonly thought of as restrictive rules, but in "Kill Marguerite" 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 then mixes in teen comedies, young adult novels, video games, choose-your-own adventure tales, epistolary novels, gothic tales, family romances, and 'trauma-rama' entries, until this melee of genres interrupt each other, parasite each other, and distort each other. The result of this romp is absurd, grotesque, parapornographic, violent, gurlesque, but mot of all hilarious in a dead-pan kind of way."
--Johannes Goransson, Action Books
"Killl