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Kill Marguerite and Other Stories
Kill Marguerite and Other Stories collects thirteen risk-taking stories obsessed with crossing boundaries, whether formal or corporeal. Narrative genres are giddily the Sweet Valley twins get stuck in a choose-your-own-adventure story; Mean Girls-like violence gets embedded within a classic video game. Protagonists cycle through a series of startling, sometimes violent, changes in gender, physiology, and even species, occasionally blurring into other characters or swapping identities entirely. One woman metamorphoses into a giant slug; another quite literally eats her heart out; a wasp falls in love with an orchid; and a Greek god impregnates a man’s thigh with a sword. More than just a straightforward celebration of the carnivalesque, though, these fictions are deeply engaged, both critically and politically, with the ways that social power operates on, and through, queer bodies.
207 pages, Paperback
First published January 7, 2014
381 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
March 10, 2015
I am ecstatic to learn that Kill Marguerite has been named a finalist in the LGBT Debut category of the 27th Annual Lambda Literary Awards!
KM reviewed by Aishwarya Subramanian at Sunday Guardian:
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbe...
"This is an area of popular culture which literature rarely draws upon — possibly because of its association with young girls, whose tastes are always particularly open for mockery. That Milks sees it as important would be itself be enough to make me love her work. That the collection deals with it in this way — smart, queer, perverse, inter-textual—means even more. The stories in Kill Marguerite are unsettling and often unpleasant but they feel like a gift."
KM reviewed by Brit Mandelo as part of Tor's Queering SFF series:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/06/quee...
"Kill Marguerite and Other Stories is quite a ride. It left me bewildered and a touch grossed out…but also thoughtful, considering pieces like the short “My Father and I Were Bent Groundward” long after I finished them. It’s a look into the experimental end of what queer writers are doing at the moment: messing around with text, with narrative, with identity and self-referentiality and aggression, with the history of bizarro fiction and the hyperreal."
KM reviewed by Valerie Stivers at HTML Giant:
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/kill-mar...
"These are genderqueer girl stories of the most awesome kind, taking the basic narrative of boys, youth, sex and identity, scrambling them with their influences (pop music, porn, sexual fantasy, teen magazines and books, even video games), and then destroying them in gory pornographic explosions."
KM reviewed by Daphne Sidor at Lambda Literary:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews...
"This collection establishes Milks as a writer who can do just about anything but who will, one expects, keep doing the bidding of her macabre but humane imagination."
More info at http://meganmilks.com/kill-marguerite/.
KM reviewed by Aishwarya Subramanian at Sunday Guardian:
http://www.sunday-guardian.com/bookbe...
"This is an area of popular culture which literature rarely draws upon — possibly because of its association with young girls, whose tastes are always particularly open for mockery. That Milks sees it as important would be itself be enough to make me love her work. That the collection deals with it in this way — smart, queer, perverse, inter-textual—means even more. The stories in Kill Marguerite are unsettling and often unpleasant but they feel like a gift."
KM reviewed by Brit Mandelo as part of Tor's Queering SFF series:
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2014/06/quee...
"Kill Marguerite and Other Stories is quite a ride. It left me bewildered and a touch grossed out…but also thoughtful, considering pieces like the short “My Father and I Were Bent Groundward” long after I finished them. It’s a look into the experimental end of what queer writers are doing at the moment: messing around with text, with narrative, with identity and self-referentiality and aggression, with the history of bizarro fiction and the hyperreal."
KM reviewed by Valerie Stivers at HTML Giant:
http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/kill-mar...
"These are genderqueer girl stories of the most awesome kind, taking the basic narrative of boys, youth, sex and identity, scrambling them with their influences (pop music, porn, sexual fantasy, teen magazines and books, even video games), and then destroying them in gory pornographic explosions."
KM reviewed by Daphne Sidor at Lambda Literary:
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/reviews...
"This collection establishes Milks as a writer who can do just about anything but who will, one expects, keep doing the bidding of her macabre but humane imagination."
More info at http://meganmilks.com/kill-marguerite/.
April 5, 2014
Kill Marguerite by Megan Milks is really freaking good and a genre-bender that fuses gaming, pop culture, social dysfunction, and identity crises, all while exploring nostalgic forms of narrative in ways that’ll make your heart explode. Literally, into a tomato, as in “Tomato Heart,” a story that allegorizes love and relationships into a ripe red fruit:
“My heart burst out of my chest. It popped through its arterial fence, it surged through my lungs and my rib cage, and ejected itself through various nervous tissues and muscle fibers with a final rip through the hole I had made in my skin… I was more fascinated than alarmed- fascinated because my heart, now visible to the world, looked remarkably like a tomato.”
http://tieryas.wordpress.com/2014/04/...
“My heart burst out of my chest. It popped through its arterial fence, it surged through my lungs and my rib cage, and ejected itself through various nervous tissues and muscle fibers with a final rip through the hole I had made in my skin… I was more fascinated than alarmed- fascinated because my heart, now visible to the world, looked remarkably like a tomato.”
http://tieryas.wordpress.com/2014/04/...
April 25, 2016
Some of the strangest and most innovative fiction I've ever read. Megan Milks is up there with Octavia Butler and Nalo Hopkinson for having the most inventive and fucked-up imaginations ever. This is a book unlike any other I've ever read. After having sex with a giant slug, a woman turns into one. A woman's heart is a tomato and escapes from her chest; her relationship ends. A wasp and an orchid struggle to have a monogamous relationship in a world where insect-flower relationships are supposed to be polyamorous. One story is a choose-your-own-adventure borrowing from Sweet Valley High, Your Teacher is an Alien, and The Babysitter's Club. Another is in the format of a video game, the main character repeatedly dying but getting more shots to beat her rival in a middle school Mean Girls setting.
Smart, funny, grotesque, very new; highly recommended!
Smart, funny, grotesque, very new; highly recommended!
March 29, 2014
Fantastic stuff. Milks bends genre like gender. She appropriates the format of video games, Sweet Valley High books, and Choose Your Own Adventure books to form...sure, literary genius, but the most important thing: Fun. Joy. A love of literature.
September 2, 2016
There is lots of really great fiction that is well written and fun to read but you still couldn't really call it new. This, on the other hand, busts out with something never seen before, like an alien just landed, and it's hard to even know where to begin with what to say about it except, like Frankenstein's monster, IT'S ALIVE!!!
March 10, 2014
This book dripped perversely into my consciousness and stuck. Only a steady and sagacious writer like Milk can make paddling through this kind of muck so absolutely pleasurable.
January 17, 2016
One of the most innovative, strangely creative and unusual books I have ever read. Megan Milks is an author to track and watch closely. I can't wait to read her next book!
June 16, 2014
was not expecting to emotionally connect to an orchid and a wasp
really enjoyed these stories
will write longer review soon
really enjoyed these stories
will write longer review soon
April 7, 2015
Reviewed it here.
July 20, 2015
Megan Milks’s collection Kill Marguerite and Other Stories is both innovative and uncomfortable. The stories frequently use frameworks to shape the outcomes, such as the title story in which two adolescent girls battle it out for popularity and respect in a videogame, allowing them to use weapons, found objects (like jet packs and hearts), and lose lives when they are killed. Other stories, like “Twins,” which comes in two parts (“Elizabeth’s Lament” and “Sweet Valley Twins #119: Abducted!”) use popular culture that many women today will admit they were raised on: Sweet Valley Twins, The Babysitter’s Club, and My Teacher is An Alien. The collection also uses song lyrics, Ancient Greek myth, violence, a whole lot of body fluids, and plays with concepts of gender.
The use of pop culture that is familiar to me was definitely my favorite aspect of the collection. Milks uses common conventions to make a connection to readers that also gives them the opportunity to reconsider what they thought they knew. In the title story, the girls live in a videogame world. Here, Milks is rather clever; the way players process new information in videogames and learn from it to make better choices after they die in a tough level challenges the notion that we can’t go back and have the perfect witty comment or knock the mean girl on her ass. Essentially, readers can relive their own brutal adolescence with the hope that a particular moment can be redone until it’s how we want it.
A problem with relying so heavily on popular culture is that it could leave a lot of readers confused. Had I not read hundreds of Sweet Valley Twins and Babysitter’s Club books, the references would have been lost on me. Personally, I’ve never read one of the My Teacher is an Alien books, but the title of that series kind of gives it away. There was also a story that uses lyrics from a song or band that I’ve never heard of. The relationships between the girls, though, are rather intricate but seemingly simplistic. Without knowing those relationships, some of Milks’s writing loses its power and sounds mean or trite, such as why one character is so popular and another is a loser. There is no room for expansion on these claims because they are well-known facts in the world of the Wakefield twins and the babysitters.
Another problem many readers may have is with Milks’s constant use of bodies being what we normally consider gross. Only in a few stories, like “Swamp Cycle” and “Slug,” did I have a deep-seated gross feeling (one that lasted for days). I expected “The Girl with the Expectorating Orifices” to be the worst offender, but instead I saw this story as the one that made the most sense. The girl with the expectorating orifices pukes when she’s drank too much, has snot running down her face when she’s crying, she menstruates, and gets diarrhea when she’s too anxious. This all sounds pretty normal to me, but we are so uncomfortable with our bodily functions that they are removed from public view. At first, the story seems gross, but as it goes on and the narrator shows how everyone has expectorating orifices, the story becomes almost comfortable and relatable.
Other stories, like “Slug,” explore bodies in a way I didn’t understand. “Slug” is the tale of a young woman named Patty who dates men and punishes them (I think) by shoving dildos in their assholes. She wears a strap on under her skirt and seems generally unsatisfied sexually. But when a six-foot slug climbs in through her window, suctions its way down her body, and then enters her vagina and nibbles on her cervix, Patty is sold. Eventually, she turns into a slug as well and, long story short, ends up eating off the other slug’s penis. Trying to figure out the symbolism of all of this is hard work—which doesn’t mean it’s not worth the work. At first, I thought that Patty wanted a penis and then became a penis (a slug), but then she…ate a penis? Or, the story could be a metaphor for a female to male transition (I think).
So, here is where I start to feel like both an idiot and a bad person. Because Milks’s characters are pretty gender fluid (pronouns switch, names typically reserved for one gender are used for another, roles disappear), I get that she’s writing about topics that are not discussed often in public, nor are we educated about such subjects, though I truly wish we were. I read as much as I can about gender so that I am educated, but I also recognize I am an outsider who may not fully understand. Since I don’t want to assume what Patty is doing in this story and end up looking like I don’t accept and respect gender differences, “Slug” left me feeling pretty awful.
On the other hand, “Earl and Ed” was a story that used metaphor to examine “unnatural” relationships that are shunned by the majority and how violence and sadness can result, and it was done in a way that allowed me to both learn and enjoy the story. Earl is a wasp (penetrating stinger—I’m making assumptions) that is referred to in feminine pronouns. Ed is a flower (just think Frida Kahlo) referred to in masculine pronouns. Ed can create life, whereas Earl is always leaving because she needs her freedom to fly (I kept thinking “and this bird you cannot change”). The roles of the characters change from what is “expected” and kept me reading and questioning what would happen to this bee-flower relationship.
Overall, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories stretched the boundaries of my understanding and comfort. I applaud Milks for writing challenging fiction that goes against the standard of easily-digestible reads that reiterate what readers already believe. Although a tough collection, readers who want to come away from a book feeling differently will enjoy this collection.
Review originally published at The Next Best Book Club and later re-blogged at Grab the Lapels.
The use of pop culture that is familiar to me was definitely my favorite aspect of the collection. Milks uses common conventions to make a connection to readers that also gives them the opportunity to reconsider what they thought they knew. In the title story, the girls live in a videogame world. Here, Milks is rather clever; the way players process new information in videogames and learn from it to make better choices after they die in a tough level challenges the notion that we can’t go back and have the perfect witty comment or knock the mean girl on her ass. Essentially, readers can relive their own brutal adolescence with the hope that a particular moment can be redone until it’s how we want it.
A problem with relying so heavily on popular culture is that it could leave a lot of readers confused. Had I not read hundreds of Sweet Valley Twins and Babysitter’s Club books, the references would have been lost on me. Personally, I’ve never read one of the My Teacher is an Alien books, but the title of that series kind of gives it away. There was also a story that uses lyrics from a song or band that I’ve never heard of. The relationships between the girls, though, are rather intricate but seemingly simplistic. Without knowing those relationships, some of Milks’s writing loses its power and sounds mean or trite, such as why one character is so popular and another is a loser. There is no room for expansion on these claims because they are well-known facts in the world of the Wakefield twins and the babysitters.
Another problem many readers may have is with Milks’s constant use of bodies being what we normally consider gross. Only in a few stories, like “Swamp Cycle” and “Slug,” did I have a deep-seated gross feeling (one that lasted for days). I expected “The Girl with the Expectorating Orifices” to be the worst offender, but instead I saw this story as the one that made the most sense. The girl with the expectorating orifices pukes when she’s drank too much, has snot running down her face when she’s crying, she menstruates, and gets diarrhea when she’s too anxious. This all sounds pretty normal to me, but we are so uncomfortable with our bodily functions that they are removed from public view. At first, the story seems gross, but as it goes on and the narrator shows how everyone has expectorating orifices, the story becomes almost comfortable and relatable.
Other stories, like “Slug,” explore bodies in a way I didn’t understand. “Slug” is the tale of a young woman named Patty who dates men and punishes them (I think) by shoving dildos in their assholes. She wears a strap on under her skirt and seems generally unsatisfied sexually. But when a six-foot slug climbs in through her window, suctions its way down her body, and then enters her vagina and nibbles on her cervix, Patty is sold. Eventually, she turns into a slug as well and, long story short, ends up eating off the other slug’s penis. Trying to figure out the symbolism of all of this is hard work—which doesn’t mean it’s not worth the work. At first, I thought that Patty wanted a penis and then became a penis (a slug), but then she…ate a penis? Or, the story could be a metaphor for a female to male transition (I think).
So, here is where I start to feel like both an idiot and a bad person. Because Milks’s characters are pretty gender fluid (pronouns switch, names typically reserved for one gender are used for another, roles disappear), I get that she’s writing about topics that are not discussed often in public, nor are we educated about such subjects, though I truly wish we were. I read as much as I can about gender so that I am educated, but I also recognize I am an outsider who may not fully understand. Since I don’t want to assume what Patty is doing in this story and end up looking like I don’t accept and respect gender differences, “Slug” left me feeling pretty awful.
On the other hand, “Earl and Ed” was a story that used metaphor to examine “unnatural” relationships that are shunned by the majority and how violence and sadness can result, and it was done in a way that allowed me to both learn and enjoy the story. Earl is a wasp (penetrating stinger—I’m making assumptions) that is referred to in feminine pronouns. Ed is a flower (just think Frida Kahlo) referred to in masculine pronouns. Ed can create life, whereas Earl is always leaving because she needs her freedom to fly (I kept thinking “and this bird you cannot change”). The roles of the characters change from what is “expected” and kept me reading and questioning what would happen to this bee-flower relationship.
Overall, Kill Marguerite and Other Stories stretched the boundaries of my understanding and comfort. I applaud Milks for writing challenging fiction that goes against the standard of easily-digestible reads that reiterate what readers already believe. Although a tough collection, readers who want to come away from a book feeling differently will enjoy this collection.
Review originally published at The Next Best Book Club and later re-blogged at Grab the Lapels.
March 22, 2018
This author was trying waaaaaay too hard to be gross and edgy.
Read
March 27, 2023Though I wasn't in to the stories I am very in to the unique ideas and style Megan Milks has
June 30, 2014
One of the edgiest queer writers in the world today. Megan Milk's work studies our lonely needs, our female selves awash in ugly feelings, and knife-like relationships that dance around attraction and longing in the queer community.
Milks takes girl outcasts, shows us their ambivalence with gender games and then shows us their inevitable fall as they lose and lose and lose.
Her appearance on the literary scene is as if the effects of our reading Judy Bloom at a tender age had seeded something deep in the muck of the literary world, that eventually rose up like a strange pungent flower to look upon those somewhat stagnant waters.
Milks takes girl outcasts, shows us their ambivalence with gender games and then shows us their inevitable fall as they lose and lose and lose.
Her appearance on the literary scene is as if the effects of our reading Judy Bloom at a tender age had seeded something deep in the muck of the literary world, that eventually rose up like a strange pungent flower to look upon those somewhat stagnant waters.
June 1, 2014
Ok, I really wanted to love this whole-heartedly (and to be honest, it practically deserves 5 stars for the Sweet Valley High bits alone, especially the story that mashes up specific books from Sweet Valley High, the Babysitters' Club, Choose Your Own Adventure, AND My Teacher Is an Alien - so genius), but my problem is that I pretty much hate gross-out stuff and for every brilliant story, there is one featuring oozing or shitting and/or titled "The Girl with the Expectorating Orifices" (seriously), and I just could NOT with those.
September 8, 2014
A most excellent, strange, and wily read. The gross-outs don't just go through the motions but invoke all kinds of ways to be freaky in your body, to inhabit another body, to bounce around the universe. So so good!
February 9, 2014
Review tk.
February 3, 2016
Some stories are ok-ish. Others are great.
My favorites: "The Girl With The Expectorating Orifices" and the TOP one must be "Incest Dream or Slam Poem For E"
My favorites: "The Girl With The Expectorating Orifices" and the TOP one must be "Incest Dream or Slam Poem For E"
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews