Heartbreaker

May 23, 2016
Meijer’s debut collection is a showcase for deviance. She reaches into the darkest parts of the human psyche where sexuality, vulnerability, and violence commingle and simmer, taking readers through the confessions of a self-mutilating foot-fetishist peeper and the bedroom of a kiddie-porn collector. “The Daddy” begins with a married mother’s Craigslist posting—“Daughter seeks father”—and follows heady role playing on dates at Dairy Queen, until one night a drunken phone call shatters a hard-won escape from reality. A couple’s relationship collapses under the weight of their elaborately constructed prison-rape fantasy in “Jailbait.” In “The Fire,” Meijer cooks up a perfectly toxic romantic thrall between an arsonist and his creation, full of capriciousness and jealous rage. No behavior is off-limits: necrophilia, bestiality, patricide. “I wish I could explain this to you, what I’m doing, why I’m doing it,” the foot fetishist Robert says. But thankfully Meijer avoids pat psychologizing. Beneath these incendiary premises, the characters’ relationships engender genuine empathy; Meijer is extraordinarily adept at tapping into a well of existential loneliness brought on by civilization’s tendency toward exclusion and shame.

Starred review from May 1, 2016
The edgy stories in Meijer's debut collection cut like so many wild teeth: sharp, deep, and unforgiving. Whether they're seeking out sex or companionship, outrunning or embracing cruelty, the female characters in these 13 stories take all the air out of the room. Throughout the collection, Meijer breaks open taboos about sex, disability, melancholy, and violence with the careful precision of a teenager egging the house of her mortal enemy. Here is all the raw anger, fear, malice, lust, and confusion of women used to threats, stalking, and ceaseless observation, who live with their lives hanging every day in the balance. In fiction, Meijer seems to say, they have a shot at making their own rules--and the results are strange, unsettling, and addictive. The foundling in "Love, Lucy" is determined to prove her disturbing lineage to the kind man who fostered her, with devastating consequences. In "Whole Life Ahead," a ghost simply wants to be left alone, although a delusional man seems set on making her his girlfriend. And, in "Fugue," three teens who think they have a shot at intimidating a young gas station attendant into sex have a terrifying--and heartbreaking--surprise waiting for them. In deft, clear prose, Meijer takes everyday moments of loss and loneliness and threads them through with elements of the gothic, fantasy, and fairy tale. "If it's not sex and not food and not a night out with the girls then what is it that I need? What is the nature of this hole and with what do I seal it up?" Kathleen asks herself in "The Daddy," a strange and sad tale about a woman who, discontent with her marriage, turns to a fetish website for comfort. Taut and ruthless, Meijer's tales somehow manage to be both believable in their strangeness and recognizable in their pointed cruelties. Here are the misfits, the overweight, and the lonely. The obsessives and the broken. Here are the monsters--and they look an awful lot like you. A dark and surprising new voice in short fiction.

COPYRIGHT(2016) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 1, 2016
A man in love with a wildfire; a gas-station clerk whose customers quickly get more than they bargained for; a girl at a weight-loss camp who gets food from an unlikely sourcethe characters in Meijer's debut collection of short stories are defined by their obsessions and are brought to life in quick, deft strokes. To enter their lives, however briefly, is to enter a warped world in which convention is upended and consequences only implied. Meijer's writing is arresting and disturbing, burning with clarity at even the most complex moments. Although each story revolves around its own inventive scenario, they share an overriding preoccupation with lust and the many ways it can manifest itself. How much, these stories seem to be asking, can someone be in control when their desires overtake them? To what extent can they be held responsible for their actions? The sharpness with which these people are drawn, largely without context beyond the immediate situation, only reinforces the strangeness of the tales they inhabit, and leaves the reader with burning questions unanswered.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)