Böcker av Matthew Thomas Meade

A young lawyer moonlights as an ersatz psychic; a woman struggles with the caregiver burden caused by her boyfriend's satanic possession; a suburban mother reckons with Kafka's The Metamorphosis in mass-casualty form. In the blank quotidian spaces of Matthew Meade's debut collection, circumstances of profound and surreal horror-reanimated corpses, conspiracy theorists attacked by "energy weapons," highbrow artwork that's alive (and acting like a jerk)-dissipate with shockingly deadpan ease into sensitive accounts of ordinary human relationships and resilience. With its heartfelt portraits of a magical world where late-stage capitalism has blurred the boundaries between the living and the dead, Strip Mall presents a strangely grace-filled vision of the dystopia already upon us.

Rocketflower is a collection of stories about the burgeoning relationship between a parent and a child. Full of messy tenderness and complicated hurts, the mosaic shaped by these stories reveals a broader overstory that wonders what it means to be human. Narrated by an often perplexed, sometimes agitated, and always curious new father, each of these tales is a message pressed into wet cement, a sigil knifed into the trunk of a tree, initials tagged in spray paint on the side of an old delicatessen; language misused to get to the untidy truth of things. The result is a work that is earnest, raw, whimsical, and furiously honest.