(pb; 2017)
From the back cover
“The creature was finally
dead. After months of fighting it, trying desperately to stop it as it rampaged
across the American countryside, turning city after city into a landscape of
rubble, we finally managed to beat the damned thing. We actually saved the
human species. We survived.
“But the corpse still lingers.
“In the center of the city
once known as Portland, Oregon, there lies a mountain of flesh. Hundreds of
thousands of tons of rotting flesh. It has filled the city with disease and
dead-lizard stench, contaminated the water supply with its greasy putrid fluids,
clogged the air with toxic gases so thick that you can’t leave your house
without the aid of a gas mask. And no one really knows quite what to do about
it. A thousand-man demolition crew has been trying to clear it out one piece at
a time, but after three months of work they’ve barely made a dent. And then
there’s the junkies who have started burrowing into the monster’s guts,
searching for a drug produced by its fire glands, setting back the excavation
even longer.
“It seems like the corpse will
never go away. And with the quarantine still in place, we’re not even allowed
to leave. We’re stuck in this disgusting rotten hell forever.
“The Big Meat is a
gut-wrenching, nerve-squirming survival story of loss, addiction and
claustrophobia.”
Review
Meat, like
Mellick’s other nailing-it works, deftly mixes genres, in this case: kaiju, drug
addiction, plague and grief dramas as well as science fiction and icky horror. Less
light-hearted than works like The Girl with the Barbed Wire Hair, Meat
flirts with the saturnine-horrific tone of Village of the Mermaids and built-up
dread of Quicksand House—it’s an inspired, entertaining 162-page novel, with
its protagonist literally going through a “gut-wrenching” situation, looking
for his disappeared Blue Food-addicted brother (David) while struggling to
survive physically and economically in what appears to be a lose/suffer-more existence.
One of
the many things I love about Mellick’s work is how he, with seeming ease,
slips in backstory details without sacrificing its odd genre mix pacing, solid
storytelling and relatable emotion impact.
Meat, less
flashy in its setup and delivery than some high-profile Mellick's books, sports a profound maturity
within its sometimes gory, genre-true (especially for kaiju fans) and
inspired situations, a work worth owning—one of my favorite reads this year.