"This collection is a testament to Milks' wild, queer, and wonderfully weird imagination."
—Autostraddle
"An antirealist anthem to sexual pleasure. . . . This pan-erotic feast never stops surprising with its fan-fiction tropes, laugh-out-loud social satire, and gorgeous sentences you can’t help but underline."
—Artforum
"Tender little stories that will make you gasp and squirm."
—Kirkus Reviews
“In these unforgettable stories, Milks’ gift for specificity and poignant body horror are on full display. . . . The gore and guts and unbelievable antics are perfect reading for this dystopian era, and Milks is an exquisite writer for this time.”
—Booklist
“Megan Milks is a master at eliciting strong reactions; their work lives in the viscera. . . . But let me assure you that there is nothing gimmicky about the conceit of these stories. They are carefully considered, successful instances of experimental fiction.”
—Literary Hub
“Unapologetically bold and insightful.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Megan Milks is the most interesting prose writer working today. There! I said it. Milks smashes fiction and glues the shards back together. Milks destroys boredom! Milks stans fanfic, retells the New Narrative, lights a million candles at the altar of queer and trans experimental literature, sends love letters to Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany and Ovid, hate-reads Sweet Valley High in the sexiest and most disturbing ways. You will never look at Tegan and Sara—or slugs, or tomatoes—in the same way again. Be careful: this collection is a virus that will permanently change the way you read. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
—Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“Video game logic, middle school best friend clubs, choose your own adventure: Megan Milks both critiques and indulges in pop culture forms, often by way of viscid zoological/extraterrestrial avatars, and does so while saying profound things about trans bodies, intimacy, and vulnerability. How did they do all this? They are so cool, and I definitely want to be their friend.”
—Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun
"Few writers are able to surprise and thrill me like Megan Milks does. Slug and Other Stories moves from fantasy to embodiment, inventing an eroticism that explodes binaries in ways that are both destabilizing and a real turn-on."
—Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World
“Slug and Other Stories mixes pop culture, Greek myth, queer feminism, and childhood nostalgia into a gory and gorgeous mess. I got my hands dirty digging into Megan Milks’s sanguine collection of short stories. This prose oozes. This prose dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milks can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable.”
—Amber Dawn, author of Sub Rosa
“These stories are pure force: they norm deviance, make violence effulgent, ungender and regender sexualities. Each story is a kitsch throwback to back in the day when reading was a fun choose your own adventure, or, these stories are not just carnal, not just animalistic, not just girly: they’re amphibian, our full corporeal tenderized to satisfaction, which is to say—hot.”
—Lily Hoang, author of Unfinished
“Genre conventions are commonly thought of as restrictive rules, but in these stories 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 teen comedies, then mixes in young adult novels, video games, choose-your-own adventure tales, epistolary novels, gothic tales, family romances, and “traumarama” entries, until this melee of genres interrupt each other, parasite each other, distort each other. The result of this romp is absurd, grotesque, parapornographic, violent, gurlesque, but most of all hilarious in a dead-pan kind of way.”
—Johannes Göransson, author of Haute Surveillance
“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
“Megan Milks’s collection 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 Twins gets a reboot finally worthy of the world their YA books helped to make weird. Milks is a master of the absurd grotesque, and Slug and Other Stories is their powerful annunciation.”
—Davis Schneiderman, author of Multifesto
★ 2021-09-29
A revised, expanded edition of Milks’ transgressive debut collection, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, originally published in 2014.
Twinship, sexual relationships, parent-child relationships, and friendships are the subjects of this hypersexual and hyperconfrontational short story collection. The author pushes every boundary and taboo, exploring how a pairing can result in one person’s dominating another or changing for another. The opening story, “Slug,” establishes the themes of free discovery and creative sexuality. A woman has sex with—and is transformed by—a giant slug following a date with a disappointing man. Human-animal erotic pairings are explored further in “Wild Animals,” in which a VHS bestiality porno “infects” a character’s mind and sexual behaviors: “There, in that other realm, was a rhythm so fixed that bodies don’t need to be.” Human-tech connections and imaginative pairings of body parts abound in daring tales that challenge certainties about gender, fantasy, and identity. Trans characters and transitions of all kinds are frequent subjects; characters’ genders and identities are malleable: “He and she can mean anything.” The author asks questions about queer communities and how they define themselves. These tales often allude to touchstones like Seventeenmagazine, The Babysitter’s Club, My Little Pony, video games, and the Choose Your Own Adventure series. Milks uses the framework or style of the source as a scaffold, but their insights about relationships are fresh and original; these are stories about deep pain, shame, lust, and love. Speculative elements are frequent, as in “The Strands,” in which a woman’s former lover’s hair grows to cover an entire apartment. One of the most arresting tales is “Patrick Gets Inspired,” an autofictional examination of an author’s attempt to write Covid pornography. It deals with infection, consummation, and release: “Spit. Droplets. Breath. Vehicles of contagion. Objects of fear.”
Tender little stories that will make you gasp and squirm.
