Slug and Other Stories (Feminist Press) is an antirealist anthem to sexual pleasure. In the collection’s opening tale, not only does a young woman have sex with a giant slug, the sex is really hot. Why limit yourself to boring dichotomies, Megan Milks seems to be saying, when you can have sex with a panther, a slug, a tree—when you can become a slug or a leopard. This book is for nerds like myself, who can’t get enough of transformation scenes in horror films. In Milks’s skilled, ever-morphing hands, the transformation scene goes on and on and on until both character and reader dissolve in rapture.
The best sex always leads to some sort of disintegration. This is a given. “She slowed down her body so her soles slapped the skin of the street in sync with the under-rhythm. It was a though she had developed an additional sense that could sear away familiar reality to reveal its organizing undertow. There, in that other realm, was a rhythm so fixed that bodies didn’t need to be.” As Milks’s unhinged characters attempt to navigate an unhinged reality, they stumble upon a kind of gooey sublime that subverts the atomistic subjecthood of Western civilization. This pan-erotic feast never stops surprising with its fan-fiction tropes, laugh-out-loud social satire, and gorgeous sentences you can’t help but underline.
Dodie Bellamy is a writer who lives in San Francisco. Her essay collection Bee Reaved and a new edition of her 1998 novel The Letters of Mina Harker were released by Semiotext(e) in October.