A review by inuyasha
Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang

2.0

not even sure how to talk about this. i love surrealism but this felt confusing and not in a fun challenging way.... the prose was VERY purple but not very clever imo - weird simple rhyme schemes and metaphors that didn't add to the text ("proud as teeth", "the coin of her wrist"). the obsession with talking about literal dog shit got tiring after chapter 3 as well. but also! the concept of loyalty between two girls being more powerful than any magic in the entire world, to the point where you can create your own magic and laws....... Peak. also all dogs being gods we ignore was a very fun concept. i just wish it had hit harder for me!!

i think kids (especially little girls) are weird and wild and in the beginning i thought it was fun to try to dissect how they were misrepresenting/regurgitating what adults in their lives were sharing but i wish we had felt that tone/voice change post-time skip, especially for rainie's chapters, who is always positioned as more level headed and grounded in reality than anita but whose voice felt pretty much the same. or, alternatively, i wish we had felt more isolated in how anita/rainie's connection was the weird and magical thing here - when Everything becomes weird and horrific and magical it's hard to care about the central crux of it all, i guess.

there were a lot of cool concepts and ideas here but as a whole it fell really flat - i think i'd enjoy this author's short story collections more.