Heartbreaker
Stories
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
In her debut story collection, Heartbreaker, Maryse Meijer, flashlight in hand, goes deep into the darkest rooms of the psyche. With gorgeously restrained and exacting prose that packs a cumulatively devastating punch, she unapologetically unmasks the violence we are willing to perform upon one another in the name of love and loneliness and the unremitting desire to survive. In doing so, she lights societal convention and reader expectation on fire, exploring the darker emotional truths surrounding love and sex, femininity and masculinity, family and girlhood.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Meijer's debut collection is a showcase for deviance. She reaches into the darkest parts of the human psyche where sexuality, vulnerability, and violence commingle and simmer, taking readers through the confessions of a self-mutilating foot-fetishist peeper and the bedroom of a kiddie-porn collector. "The Daddy" begins with a married mother's Craigslist posting "Daughter seeks father" and follows heady role playing on dates at Dairy Queen, until one night a drunken phone call shatters a hard-won escape from reality. A couple's relationship collapses under the weight of their elaborately constructed prison-rape fantasy in "Jailbait." In "The Fire," Meijer cooks up a perfectly toxic romantic thrall between an arsonist and his creation, full of capriciousness and jealous rage. No behavior is off-limits: necrophilia, bestiality, patricide. "I wish I could explain this to you, what I'm doing, why I'm doing it," the foot fetishist Robert says. But thankfully Meijer avoids pat psychologizing. Beneath these incendiary premises, the characters' relationships engender genuine empathy; Meijer is extraordinarily adept at tapping into a well of existential loneliness brought on by civilization's tendency toward exclusion and shame.
