Organ Meats

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. (Oct.)