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Failure to Thrive
“Meghan Lamb’s debut novel is a marvel. It’s an indelible portrait of a nearly forgotten place, full of stunted lives and desperate hopes, decaying homes and fading memories, ghostly presences brought vividly to life. It’s a timely exploration of the failures that seep into our lives like slow leaks and the systems that intensify them. It’s a haunted landscape made luminous by Lamb’s exquisite prose.”
—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters
"Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark."
—Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere
"Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun."
—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
—Jeff Jackson, author of Destroy All Monsters
"Failure to Thrive captures slow collapse like nothing else I've read. It is packed with heartbreakingly acute observation, and yet it is uncrowded and spacious, with a gauzy, hallucinatory quality. Both expansive and economical, it does more with the form of the novel than most books will ever attempt. It's a gem glittering in the dark."
—Lindsay Lerman, author of I'm From Nowhere
"Meghan Lamb is such an exquisite, comprehensively intelligent, dreamy writer. Failure to Thrive exudes utmost pleasure and a defying ache from every dot of its ink, like the sun."
—Dennis Cooper, author of The Marbled Swarm
244 pages, Paperback
Published November 9, 2021
4 people are currently reading
400 people want to read
About the author
Meghan Lamb
22 books80 followersAuthor of Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace) and Sacramento (Solar Luxuriance)
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
February 25, 2022
Here is a deteriorating town whose residents move in slow retrograde. There is history, which people gossip furtively about, and secrets that remain shuttered behind cracked doors and aching heads. Life is hard here. But almost everyone rises with the yellow grey sky to continue with the monotonous schedules that make up their determined lives. A novel that places everything where it first fell, fires burning sub rosa under the damaged earth, the shit stream flowing orange.
March 12, 2022
Meghan Lamb's writing is what I look for and rarely find in contemporary American realist fiction. Admittedly, though, I don't try very hard in this endeavour, because in general realist fiction bores me. But Lamb is a writer who knows the ways to make realism interesting—blurring and scribbling outside the rigid lines that so many realist writers insist on staying within. I've read all of the fiction of hers I've been able to track down and it's never failed to captivate me, only getting better as time goes on. She writes around the unsaid with surgical precision—expertly troweling rich, earthy language into the gaps you almost forgot were there. And yet this language when cured into narrative is paradoxically both spare and dense, reflective of a deep care in word choice and sentence-level mechanics. Failure to Thrive visits a broken coal town by way of the stories of three individuals, each suffering their own tragedy. These tragedies radiate out, passing the pain through family veins. The town as a whole rests upon a delicate pyre constructed from this pain and the pain of all the stories that came before the ones we read here. It could be a real town, rooted as it is in actual history and studded with bits and pieces of the real (revealed in photos at the end). But instead Lamb's version serves to amplify the real, serving as an amalgamation of what could be the stories of so many thousands of other Americans living or having lived in towns just like it.
July 16, 2022
A sad, impressionistic look at the environmental destruction & waste of human potential in Pennsylvania’s coal country.
February 14, 2024
A quiet and harrowing story about the inhabitants of a small, disintegrating coal town. This book was so heartbreakingly beautiful. Reading it was like if you are a ghost yourself, wandering throughout the small town, watching the lives slowly being swallowed. Lamb’s haunting and poetic prose adds such perfect intimacy to this book. This immediately has become a favorite. Maybe it’s because I grew up in a small town too, always fascinated by the history of the old run down houses that still stand in the middle of the woods.
September 9, 2024
"You need to know what once was there, or you will never notice anything. You'll likely just drive through it, up the steep curve of the mountain, on the new highway, not knowing there's an old highway - paint-sprayed and cracked, behind the trees - that had to be abandoned. The whole thing looks like hills and brush."
4.5
Desolate. Barren. Bleak. Devastating. Those are the first words conjured when thinking about Failure To Thrive. This is a quiet, harrowing and deeply unsettling yet, painfully beautiful story of a rotting, decaying and deteriorating coal town, whose residents seem unable to fight against the regressive state of their lives. It's realist fiction, there's a rich, deep history to this novel, there's troves of small town gossip and badly kept secrets, there's the hapless inhabitants of the town just trying to survive. Meghan Lamb has somehow managed to breathe life into the mundane, taking something that should be tedious and dull and creating something so captivating and marvelous from it instead. Behind each rotting door and broken window, despite their crushing circumstances and the constantly gray skies, there are people who rise to face the day. This is their story.
Failure to Thrive captures that specific feeling of misery that I seek in fiction, a feeling so rarely found. All possible boundaries, all conventionality, lies in ruin, smudged, practically rubbed away for this enrapturing and depressing story. On the surface it feels all very nihilistic, but, it's actually not, because there is a point to the lives of these characters. In the end, it's all about survival, really. Somehow, this novel feels so rich and dense and yet so, devoid of anything. Failure to Thrive is a novel of tragedy, of pain and sadness and ruined lives and broken hearts, it's so, so crushingly somber that it practically radiates sorrow. Megan Lamb has crafted something wondrous, a story that's both believable and still sinks its hooks into our flesh.
It's heart-breaking, soul-shattering, it's absolutely glorious. Reading this novel makes you feel as if you've been hollowed out, as if your soul has been removed, it makes you feel as if you're being swallowed by the coal town, as if you're nothing but a ghost, fading into the nothingness. This could easily be a novel about a real town, we could so very easily, be visiting the lives of real people, that's the true beauty of it all. It's simply a sad, sad look at a waste of potential. Standing witness to the slow decline of these characters, unable to intervene as their lives crumble, it's something striking and poetic and all too affecting.
Failure to Thrive occupies a space in literature in which there is a massive, yawning gap. We need more novels such as this one, they're more than simply books, they are works of art, ones that leave us with an almost impossible to describe level of melancholy. They say the devil is in the details, but here, the devil lies in the subtleties, in the death and decay captured by this novel. It's a wholly unsettling thing, a grim, wonderful, euphoric read about the final breaths of small town America. If there's one last book you're going to read, make it this one.
"It is a late fall night. The smell of burning leaves has been replaced by smells of burnt ash buried underneath the frost. The cold damp of the wind picks up the coal dust. David thinks, it is a lonely smell, the coal dust blowing in the cold. He thinks about the old coal fireplace his parents used to use. It was a pain to load, and to clean, and honestly, it smelled bad. But he feels strange now, standing in his own front yard, with his own family, looking down at the town, breathing the lonely cold."
4.5
Desolate. Barren. Bleak. Devastating. Those are the first words conjured when thinking about Failure To Thrive. This is a quiet, harrowing and deeply unsettling yet, painfully beautiful story of a rotting, decaying and deteriorating coal town, whose residents seem unable to fight against the regressive state of their lives. It's realist fiction, there's a rich, deep history to this novel, there's troves of small town gossip and badly kept secrets, there's the hapless inhabitants of the town just trying to survive. Meghan Lamb has somehow managed to breathe life into the mundane, taking something that should be tedious and dull and creating something so captivating and marvelous from it instead. Behind each rotting door and broken window, despite their crushing circumstances and the constantly gray skies, there are people who rise to face the day. This is their story.
Failure to Thrive captures that specific feeling of misery that I seek in fiction, a feeling so rarely found. All possible boundaries, all conventionality, lies in ruin, smudged, practically rubbed away for this enrapturing and depressing story. On the surface it feels all very nihilistic, but, it's actually not, because there is a point to the lives of these characters. In the end, it's all about survival, really. Somehow, this novel feels so rich and dense and yet so, devoid of anything. Failure to Thrive is a novel of tragedy, of pain and sadness and ruined lives and broken hearts, it's so, so crushingly somber that it practically radiates sorrow. Megan Lamb has crafted something wondrous, a story that's both believable and still sinks its hooks into our flesh.
"There is the world as it is - as it has always been - for Emily. The world of the town, the mural of the town. The world of chipped paint, boarded windows, beautiful things, ugly things, of two extremes, always together, blending into one. The world of paper rotted into walls, of walls bending and bowing, wires tangled into vines, the shit-creek, of all things that people lose, or toss, forget about, inside that creek, turning in small frustrated circles, burning and disintegrating into nothing. "
It's heart-breaking, soul-shattering, it's absolutely glorious. Reading this novel makes you feel as if you've been hollowed out, as if your soul has been removed, it makes you feel as if you're being swallowed by the coal town, as if you're nothing but a ghost, fading into the nothingness. This could easily be a novel about a real town, we could so very easily, be visiting the lives of real people, that's the true beauty of it all. It's simply a sad, sad look at a waste of potential. Standing witness to the slow decline of these characters, unable to intervene as their lives crumble, it's something striking and poetic and all too affecting.
Failure to Thrive occupies a space in literature in which there is a massive, yawning gap. We need more novels such as this one, they're more than simply books, they are works of art, ones that leave us with an almost impossible to describe level of melancholy. They say the devil is in the details, but here, the devil lies in the subtleties, in the death and decay captured by this novel. It's a wholly unsettling thing, a grim, wonderful, euphoric read about the final breaths of small town America. If there's one last book you're going to read, make it this one.
"It is a late fall night. The smell of burning leaves has been replaced by smells of burnt ash buried underneath the frost. The cold damp of the wind picks up the coal dust. David thinks, it is a lonely smell, the coal dust blowing in the cold. He thinks about the old coal fireplace his parents used to use. It was a pain to load, and to clean, and honestly, it smelled bad. But he feels strange now, standing in his own front yard, with his own family, looking down at the town, breathing the lonely cold."
June 15, 2023
Reviewed by Ariana Tucker on www.rowanglassworks.org.
“Failure to thrive” is the medical term used for the slow development of an infant due to a lack of nutrients. Babies who receive this diagnosis will often have developmental delays later in life. This condition can be the result of an internal, chromosomal issue or the environment around the child. In either case, death is imminent unless there is interference.
Meghan Lamb’s debut novel, Failure to Thrive captures that slow process and the inability to thrive in settings that produce nothing but death and decay. The story takes place in a Pennsylvania coal town poisoned by an underground fire. Divided into three sections, it centers around three families: a young couple struggling to raise a neurodivergent daughter, a woman caring for a dying parent and dealing with the after-effects of her past substance abuse, and a young man dealing with memory loss after a catastrophic accident. Lamb uses genre-bending prose, vivid imagery, and subtle characterization to highlight the major themes of her novel.
In each section, readers follow each of the characters into a slow decline. We watch their lives fall apart as they struggle to overcome their situations. The spaces that they occupy generate an atmospheric sense of emptiness, a feeling that the prose’s design replicates. There is something wonderfully haunting about Lamb’s prose and the strategic way she arranges the words on the page. Readers who pick up this book will likely first notice the short snapshots that make up each chapter and the text that drifts across the page like whispers of smoke. She lets sounds speak for themselves; spelling out every “cooroo” (19) of the birds and “Kkkkkk-AHHHH” (131) of a dying man’s cough so that it can be felt. She gives life and voice to the words and sounds that make up the character’s world until you can’t help but feel them move through you.
Lamb doesn’t capture her characters’ decline through grand, dramatic scenes of conflict or action. Instead, it’s the subtle, unsettling details of mundane experiences that encapsulate this slow process of decay and death. In the first section, the narrator introduces Olivia, a woman who is neurodivergent and trying desperately to stick to her daily schedule in the absence of her parents. Lamb contrasts Olivia’s lonely present with her parents’ thriving past, the life they lived before they had her. This contrast only sharpens Olivia’s loneliness and hunger as she waits for a breakfast that never comes. It is accentuated by a single, heartbreaking description: “Her stomach feels like a long-forgotten basement” (26).
Lamb sprinkles descriptions like this throughout the novel, effectively highlighting the absences that loss and trauma leave behind. With Helen, Lamb takes simple pleasures like enjoying a meal with a parent and turns them into something sickening. Forced to thicken and blend everything her father drinks and eats, Helen serves him water that is “the consistency of honey” and is “pale yellow sick and smells like sulfur.” (143). A desire to relive her childhood and enjoy their favorite shared treat of ice cream with dark chocolate bits results in dissatisfaction. With Jack, his life is a blend of odd-tasting pills and life with loved ones he can’t fully remember. The stilted dialogue and awkward pauses transform family dinners and a night out with the boys into an unfamiliar place.
Connecting them all is the fire that speaks in italics and breathes its poisonous smoke into the town, disrupting seasons and their way of life. While the characters grapple with survival and hang over the edge of death, the fire remains constant, the only remaining witness of what was once a thriving town.
What Lamb takes the time to describe is just as important as what she leaves out. Readers can expect to finish this novel with questions still lingering in the back of their minds. What happened to Olivia’s mother? How did Helen really lose her job? Will Jack ever recover his memories and what has he forgotten? To enjoy this book, you have to be prepared to exist in uncertainty. Lamb trusts her readers to fill in the details she omits and read into the under-running stories the existing narratives hint at.
Failure to Thrive shows us how quickly the little things in life—the disappointments, the mistakes, the choices we make—pile up over time. How little control we sometimes have over our environments and the things that make us. How life has to be desired and fought for, and just how hard that fight can be at times.
“Failure to thrive” is the medical term used for the slow development of an infant due to a lack of nutrients. Babies who receive this diagnosis will often have developmental delays later in life. This condition can be the result of an internal, chromosomal issue or the environment around the child. In either case, death is imminent unless there is interference.
Meghan Lamb’s debut novel, Failure to Thrive captures that slow process and the inability to thrive in settings that produce nothing but death and decay. The story takes place in a Pennsylvania coal town poisoned by an underground fire. Divided into three sections, it centers around three families: a young couple struggling to raise a neurodivergent daughter, a woman caring for a dying parent and dealing with the after-effects of her past substance abuse, and a young man dealing with memory loss after a catastrophic accident. Lamb uses genre-bending prose, vivid imagery, and subtle characterization to highlight the major themes of her novel.
In each section, readers follow each of the characters into a slow decline. We watch their lives fall apart as they struggle to overcome their situations. The spaces that they occupy generate an atmospheric sense of emptiness, a feeling that the prose’s design replicates. There is something wonderfully haunting about Lamb’s prose and the strategic way she arranges the words on the page. Readers who pick up this book will likely first notice the short snapshots that make up each chapter and the text that drifts across the page like whispers of smoke. She lets sounds speak for themselves; spelling out every “cooroo” (19) of the birds and “Kkkkkk-AHHHH” (131) of a dying man’s cough so that it can be felt. She gives life and voice to the words and sounds that make up the character’s world until you can’t help but feel them move through you.
Lamb doesn’t capture her characters’ decline through grand, dramatic scenes of conflict or action. Instead, it’s the subtle, unsettling details of mundane experiences that encapsulate this slow process of decay and death. In the first section, the narrator introduces Olivia, a woman who is neurodivergent and trying desperately to stick to her daily schedule in the absence of her parents. Lamb contrasts Olivia’s lonely present with her parents’ thriving past, the life they lived before they had her. This contrast only sharpens Olivia’s loneliness and hunger as she waits for a breakfast that never comes. It is accentuated by a single, heartbreaking description: “Her stomach feels like a long-forgotten basement” (26).
Lamb sprinkles descriptions like this throughout the novel, effectively highlighting the absences that loss and trauma leave behind. With Helen, Lamb takes simple pleasures like enjoying a meal with a parent and turns them into something sickening. Forced to thicken and blend everything her father drinks and eats, Helen serves him water that is “the consistency of honey” and is “pale yellow sick and smells like sulfur.” (143). A desire to relive her childhood and enjoy their favorite shared treat of ice cream with dark chocolate bits results in dissatisfaction. With Jack, his life is a blend of odd-tasting pills and life with loved ones he can’t fully remember. The stilted dialogue and awkward pauses transform family dinners and a night out with the boys into an unfamiliar place.
Connecting them all is the fire that speaks in italics and breathes its poisonous smoke into the town, disrupting seasons and their way of life. While the characters grapple with survival and hang over the edge of death, the fire remains constant, the only remaining witness of what was once a thriving town.
What Lamb takes the time to describe is just as important as what she leaves out. Readers can expect to finish this novel with questions still lingering in the back of their minds. What happened to Olivia’s mother? How did Helen really lose her job? Will Jack ever recover his memories and what has he forgotten? To enjoy this book, you have to be prepared to exist in uncertainty. Lamb trusts her readers to fill in the details she omits and read into the under-running stories the existing narratives hint at.
Failure to Thrive shows us how quickly the little things in life—the disappointments, the mistakes, the choices we make—pile up over time. How little control we sometimes have over our environments and the things that make us. How life has to be desired and fought for, and just how hard that fight can be at times.
May 8, 2023
A pretty bleak novel with the decay of a town played out through several stories of its inhabitants. Or seen another way, how individuals lives decay and seep into their external environment.
Meghan Lamb has skilfully shown how rot sets in and if untreated can lead to everything crumbling.
Meghan Lamb has skilfully shown how rot sets in and if untreated can lead to everything crumbling.
July 17, 2025
actually thinking abt this book a lot more now... love the slow apocalypse, nihilism in western society, if you don't give a shit abt other ppl soon that will bite u in the ass too etc..
February 16, 2023
Words and chapter organization is extremely choppy. (I’ve figured that it wasn’t my cup of tea).
The choice of “interesting” placement of words that goes all over around the page is overdone. I have no interest in reading a page of eeeermmmmemememmem hhhhhmmmm eeekekeeksees mmmmmmemmm hmmmmmm hmmmmm.
Extremely repetitive sentences that slowly burns out into a bore. The writing does not meet the needs of the book’s concept.
The choice of “interesting” placement of words that goes all over around the page is overdone. I have no interest in reading a page of eeeermmmmemememmem hhhhhmmmm eeekekeeksees mmmmmmemmm hmmmmmm hmmmmm.
Extremely repetitive sentences that slowly burns out into a bore. The writing does not meet the needs of the book’s concept.
October 26, 2024
The ultimate broken down, small town slow burn, aptly set in Northern PA.
Such an amazing job at leveraging writing structure and applying tact & restraint, ultimately dropping readers directly in town to fill in looming, growing cracks seeping forth.
My only regret is not saving this for the dead of winter, but I guess it'll just have to get in a re-read during in our bleak NEPA weather soon approaching.
Such an amazing job at leveraging writing structure and applying tact & restraint, ultimately dropping readers directly in town to fill in looming, growing cracks seeping forth.
My only regret is not saving this for the dead of winter, but I guess it'll just have to get in a re-read during in our bleak NEPA weather soon approaching.
March 8, 2023
From the jacket notes, I had expected Meghan Lamb's "Failure to Thrive" to be an American "echo" of John Berger's "Into Their Labors" trilogy, particularly the first volume, a masterpiece, "Pig Earth." I was not disappointed. Like Berger, Lamb portrays a lifestyle, a community, a world-view eroding into [coal] dust. The metaphorical balance between the town and its inhabitants is ambiguous enough that each, in a sort of double-synecdoche, may stand for the other. Whether human illness (likely caused by the coal-dust in the air or the chemical tailing contents of "shit creek"), flecking-paint buildings boarded-up, gutted by fire, or never completed, the reader is arrested by a pervasive depression skillfully evoked by its author with spare language, sentence fragments delivered in staccato (itself stylistically echoing the disintegration of the town and its population), with a faint injection of loveliness that surely derives from Meghan Lamb's background in poetry. Lamb's prose (which sometimes, at the drop of a dime, actually morphs into poetry in the best tradition of Kenneth Patchen's "Journal of Albion Moonlight"), however harsh, however bleak, is yet as delicate (in this case meaning, not fragile, but finely hewn) as an H.D. poem, as sensuous and as potent, and like H.D.'s best work both alters and heightens the careful reader's own sensitivities. We care, a great deal, for the characters she portrays, whatever their warts or personality flaws. In this respect, Lamb succeeds, most wonderfully, in setting a high bar: hers, like the best of literature, cultivates our empathy, our ability to see ourselves in the "other." I don't mind breathing Lamb's coal-acrid air, because the writing itself is so exquisite that I found myself rereading several passages sheerly for the pleasure of her language.
On a more personal note, while "Failure to Thrive" is set in the coal-mining country of western Pennsylvania, it struck home for me, as my own town (Raton, New Mexico) is also a former coal-mining town, and though I've lived here five years now, the boarded-up buildings are still ubiquitous: it might just as easily have been set here.
In conclusion, I cannot escape the wonder I feel that this is Meghan Lamb's first novel. I will purchase more, for hers is most assuredly a career worth following.
On a more personal note, while "Failure to Thrive" is set in the coal-mining country of western Pennsylvania, it struck home for me, as my own town (Raton, New Mexico) is also a former coal-mining town, and though I've lived here five years now, the boarded-up buildings are still ubiquitous: it might just as easily have been set here.
In conclusion, I cannot escape the wonder I feel that this is Meghan Lamb's first novel. I will purchase more, for hers is most assuredly a career worth following.
October 26, 2022
Beautiful and heartbreaking and heartwarming and wow. Just wow. This book is real in the most important and human ways, and it hurts. It hurts in all the sensitive places and I recommend you read this at some point in your life because it will mean something to you, somehow. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down…
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June 22, 2022Sound and the Fury vibes.
The sad, lonely, inextricably linked decline of a coal town with its inhabitants is so beautifully executed. And yet the tension in the inevitability of further decline makes for such a compelling, page turning read.
The sad, lonely, inextricably linked decline of a coal town with its inhabitants is so beautifully executed. And yet the tension in the inevitability of further decline makes for such a compelling, page turning read.
October 22, 2022
A quiet and haunting book
August 24, 2025
Exceptional look into lives in Anywhere, America
February 16, 2022
I was very fortunate to read “Failure To Thrive” in one sitting. This is a powerful book, masterfully written, with an arc shaped seamlessly across several perspectives. The ending of this book was such a quietly explosive experience. Another incredible work of art brought to us through Apocalypse Party.
September 2, 2024
A novel unlike one I’ve read. Varying stories, narration, and plots. Once you cross township lines, Lamb’s rural town is open for all travelers. Was happy to visit. An exciting debut.
December 6, 2022
Beautiful. Reminds me of the times I would visit family in the most depressing parts of West Virginia. Lamb seems to have a very deep insight into decay and the way it affects people. One of the characters reminded me so much of someone I know it was eerie.
I'm so glad I bought this on a whim while browsing the titles published by Apocalypse Party.
I'm so glad I bought this on a whim while browsing the titles published by Apocalypse Party.
December 1, 2024
beautiful, grim read about the decay of small-town America and its various assortment of left-behind refuse.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews