Mike Meginnis

(...)

Biggest draw are the characters. Lyd, Mott and David are realistic and recognizable, even though they have severe personal issues. Meginnis’ main focus is on how certain people try to dominate others emotionally: both the mother and the father are quite cunning on that front. I’d go as far and say the book is connected to Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in the sense that this book too is a thinly disguised story about mental problems, resulting in a similar eerie atmosphere. It didn’t surprise me when I read in an interview that Meginnis has suffered from a deep depression – like Jackson.

Meginnis makes this aspect of psychological horror something that is both timeless and very much about our time, like when he has a character parrot discourse about personal growth, exposing a culture high on its own catchphrases & meritocratic therapeutic delusions.

I also felt a connection to the work of visual artist Paul McCarthy, as Meginnis has his characters move inside a social landscape of decay, dysfunction and a certain form of timid excess. I use the adjective ‘timid’ here because Meginnis never outdoes it, striking a difficult balance between certain satirical elements and realism, and between genre stuff and originality. McCarthy’s video work comes to mind because he also exposes – admittedly much more explicitly – dark undercurrents in American society.

(...)

Full review on Weighing A Pig Doesn't Fatten It… (más)

This novel posits the personification of the two atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II and sends them on their way through the world in what begins as a picaresque set in the devastation they have wrought and ends in a domestic comedy when they settle down to family life in a community of oddballs. Our protagonists are hardly sympathetic figures; they are stubborn, quarrelsome, and rather dim, though I suppose that one can make the case that those are the characteristics that a bomb would exhibit if it became a human. At the start of the story our heroes possess several powers, extraordinary if not supernatural; some of these are somewhat trivial, but others are destructive, and, trivial or not, none of their effects are good. At some point these powers (along with the story's undertones of musings on the deeper meanings of atomic devastation) seem to disappear, unremarked, never to be mentioned again, which is puzzling. Since this, along with the novel's structure, which is episodic, especially at first, gives the book a disjointed quality, and the book is far too long, it's an enjoyable read only occasionally and thus qualifies as something of a waste of an enormously pregnant premise.… (más)