Organ Meats

May 1, 2023

In Chang's decidedly offbeat new novel (following Gods of Want), best friends Anita and Rainie learn from a pack of stray dogs uncannily able to communicate with humans that they are descended from generations of dog-headed women and women-headed dogs. Now the girls must decide whether to become dogs themselves. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from October 2, 2023
In Chang’s bizarro and magnificent latest (after the collection Gods of Want), two teen girls resolve to become dogs. Best friends Anita Hsia and Rainie Tsai tie a red thread around their necks to bind their kinship and link them to the “motherly dog-headed women” Anita has seen in her dreams. The two girls run riot in parking lots, chase ghosts, and revel in the secrets revealed to them in visions (Anita’s mother, who worked at a pearl factory before Anita was born, is now a “sea-born god of adventure” in their minds). But when the “bitches” (“both figurative and literal”) are parted, Rainie falls into a two-week slumber and, when she wakes to the howls of her pack, tracks down Anita, who has fallen into a coma and begun to rot. To save her, Rainie will have to find new organs to sustain Anita. Chang’s hallucinogenic prose is wild and alive, a savage yawp of liberating beastliness in the face of all that would seek to yoke her heroes to the dreary laws of man. Exhibiting her surreal bona fides, Chang proves herself a worthy heir to Leonora Carrington and Unica Zürn.

Starred review from September 15, 2023
National Book Foundation's 2020 "5 Under 35" honoree Chang concludes her "mythic triptych," with a second novel following her debut, Bestiary (2020) and spectacular collection Gods of Want (2022). "In the center of summer, soft with rot," Chang opens, two best friends, Anita and Rainie, "decide to be dogs." Bound together by red threads around their necks--"We belong to each other"--they become a quartet with their canine selves, running through a final season before Rainie must move away. In protest, Rainie falls into a deep sleep for two weeks but wakes to an inevitable cleaving. Abandoned, Anita eventually becomes comatose for "ten years . . . ish," her decaying body populated with ants, eggs, even mushrooms. Just as Anita once refused to desert Rainie, Rainie returns to Anita's side, determined to replenish Anita's ""organ meats"" and succeed in "building a new body." Chang again mines fever dreams, mythic transformations, layered parables (especially those flaying gender inequity) into a narrative that eludes easy classification. Chang's existing fan base will likely be enthralled; her fantastical, visceral meanderings may confound or repel others.

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