Review: "Rag" by Maryse Maijer

One thing is crystal clear within the first few sentences of any story author Maryse Meijer writes and that is her skill at creating a certain unique mood that infects every word of the story and, in turn, the reader. Her worlds are ones where the pathway from boredom to horror is scarily narrow and nothing is more terrifying than something not said or a feeling not acted upon no matter how grotesque. Her most recent short story collection, Rag, feels a little bit like a step down from her debut collection Heartbreaker, and falls too easily into traps these kinds of stories usually fall into: a structure that feels like an outline for something much greater than the finished product and vague prose too often mistaken for a sense of mystery, but even the flattest of these stories have the tendency to crawl up the base of your spine like a noxious insect and give you nightmares. As always, I will pull out a few of my favorites t discuss here, the first of which, “Her Blood” is easily among the best, detailing the obsession that comes over a virginal young pizza boy and the woman who has a miscarriage in his store’s bathroom. It’s the first of many in this collection that mines the perversity of attraction in a graceful way, others include “Brother” where one siblings attraction to another’s girlfriend causes a horrific outcome and “Jury” where a widower is drawn to fellow juror who happens to be a cutter. But my two favorites are the brief “At the Sea” where a man might have kidnapped his maybe daughter and “The Rainbow Baby”, that takes a ridiculous premise familiar to those who have read Thomas Tryon’s The Other and makes it work with empathy and pathos. Uneven at times, but never boring, this slim collection of off-putting yet mesmerizing fiction will delight readers drawn to the strange and weird. 

Rating: 4/5