By Sinclair Adams
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
Cesar A. Cruz
In a culture where television, movies, and even social media have become the primary source for engaging with content, K-Ming Chang’s novel Organ Meats is a deafening howl of what only a book can achieve. Each page is dense with a macabre atmosphere and clever turns of phrases that linger like ghosts who have overstayed their welcome. To put it into perspective, I couldn’t read through this book without breaking out a highlighter and marking my favorite quotes and passages with blood-red lines.
Organ Meats is a book about two childhood friends, Anita and Rainie, who grow up in an unidentified drought-ridden California town. Their play-pretend games are rooted in a shared ancestry of dogs disguised as women, or women disguised as dogs. After they are separated for ten years, Anita’s body falls into a slumber and begins to rot. As an adult, Rainie returns to confront their shared destiny and heal her rotting body by tapping into the mythic powers they have always shared. Their relationship to one another is enigmatic, with Anita showing more devotion and Rainie showing more reluctance, all underscored by a subtext of feminine yearning.
The world inhabited by Anita and Rainie blends the ordinary and the mythological: it is one in which plastic bags may turn into poltergeists. While you can read the story and imagine it happening in a real small desert town in California (with a local McDonald’s and everything), the mythos that the characters experience is just as true to the story. As Anita and Rainie follow stray dogs on the street, the dogs begin to talk and tell them the stories of their people. The cement they run on and the sycamore they play around are ancient relics that tap into their fates. Organ Meats is a book that seamlessly combines ageless lore into modern times.
Just as this book blends fantasy and reality, it also invokes a variety of storytelling styles. The chapters rotate through different narrative styles, from Anita’s first-person, Rainie’s third-person, omniscient oral storytelling, and even epistolary stories from independent body parts themselves. Despite the frequent shifts in perspective, each chapter harmonizes with Chang’s lyrical writing style that can turn the ordinary into the spectacular, and the grotesque into the sacred.
Speaking of the grotesque, the one thing that might stop someone from enjoying this book is the elements of body horror. While not strictly a horror story or suspenseful novel, Organ Meats does not shy away from describing the more unsavory parts of nature. This includes rotting flesh, feces, swarming insects, and blood —lots of blood. Neither does the book shy away from characters experiencing visceral pain. All of these features were oddly part of the book’s appeal to me, as it uniquely meditates on the holiness of what many would consider repulsive, but anyone who is squeamish might want to think carefully before beginning to read this. If it makes you even slightly interested, I highly recommend picking this book up so you can experience its unsettling artistry.
The story explores themes that are also inherently uncomfortable, like the cultural value of boys over girls and manipulation by trusted individuals. Because of this, the discomfort that stems from the bodily-charged imagery feels like it belongs in the text. Another theme Organ Meats deals with is what it is like to grow up “different” from other girls without it feeling like it is playing to a certain trope. The feeling of difference that the dual protagonists experience can, in my interpretation, be attributed to the isolation experienced by queer individuals. While there are many queer elements in Organ Meats, it redefines queerness as part of the story’s lore. The emphasis on female companionship and eroticism is an ingrained part of the story, which is liberating to read, because it is a reminder that queerness isn’t something that was invented — queerness is historical and mythological. While the relationship between Anita and Rainie cannot be described as a typical romance, it makes for a very complicated, open-ended dynamic. I encourage all readers of this book to discover it for themselves and make their own interpretation on what Anita and Rainie are really all about. As much contemporary discussion about media seems to be heavily dominated by tropes, this is a liberating book that refuses to be boxed in and demands it exist for its own sake, on its own terms, and in its own glory.
Organ Meats is a book that can only be a book. It paints a picture in your mind with impossible reds and browns. Full of doppelgängers, family secrets, and a supernatural atmosphere, this book can easily be considered a modern gothic novel that still stands out with its own distinctive palette of canine imagery.
For fans of K-Ming Chang’s previous books, Bestiary and Gods of Want, this is the essential conclusion to this honorary trilogy and should not be skipped. Before autumn ends, be sure to read this book in a dimly lit room with a candle burning, while playing liminal music in the background. Dog-ear your favorite pages.
For those of you who live in New York, Organ Meats will be having an official launch party at the Greenlight Bookstore today October 31st, co-presented with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Organ Meats is available from Bookshop, City of Asylum Bookstore, Garden District Book Shop, Greenlight Bookstore, Laguna Beach Books, and Waucoma Bookstore.
Sinclair Adams (she/they) is a writer interested in speculative and science fiction narratives. She earned a B.A. in English from the University of Las Vegas and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Chapman University. She was an editor for Ouroboros Magazine, Chapman’s journal of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and other speculative fiction. Follow her on Instagram @sinclairwrites.