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3.7 AVERAGE
3.7 AVERAGE
The earliest bonds we form to an author and their words can have a huge impact in how we view the stories that are later to come. There is the effect of falling in love with the author’s words that, no matter how brilliant the second works, can’t surpass the feelings of the first. This is how I felt about Maryse Meijer’s Heartbreaker. Many of her fans love Heartbreaker and have compared her second short story collection, Rag, and find that Hearbreaker still comes out first for them. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for me. Rag was the first short story collection of hers that I read and since it was my introduction to her I hold it in higher regard. Nevertheless, I enjoyed Heartbreaker. I just felt that Rag was more intense in exploring desire to the heightened, and sometimes absurd, extreme that Meijer stretches it. Delving again into Meijer’s world brought out the weird, perverse and distburbing out into the light and I left the book thinking, what the actual hell had I just read. Meijer is the perfect writer for a literary voyeur as myself because she allows me to see into the lives of these characters and unmask them to see every single dark and horrifying thought they’ve ever had. The freedom she allows her readers and insight to see into these dark crevices and still find humanity within them is amazing. She does it in short story format too. I think the perfect way to describe all of Maryse Meijer’s works is that you will be guaranteed a visceral response each and every time.
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 ...?)