Abbey Mei Otis’s first long-form collection...is a powerful debut ... Otis’s fiction has a dynamic blend of contemporary and speculative approaches, diamond-edged and furious in her exploration of power, oppression, and grief. The titular story also serves as a statement of themes: outsider or abject characters; viral, haunting, gruesome physicality; hunger mixed with passion and crooked adoration; cataclysm before-during-and-after. It isn’t a pleasant or simple experience for the audience. The bodies in Otis’s short fiction are subject to a grim though often lyrical brutality, one step too far for comfort at all times ... We recognize it all. It recognizes us. Otis’s prose brings the intense affect of her stories not simply to life but to embodiment—it’s the kind of phrasing and artistry that a reader feels in their guts. Calling it 'body horror' doesn’t quantify the full extent of the visceral detail Otis gives through her protagonists’ often-internal, often-narrow point of view ... She is recording a lived existence with dirt, hunger, and sorrow down to the cellular level. It’s something I don’t see enough of in SF but she’s got it on lock. These people feel like people, and it makes their suffering almost unbearable to read ... It’s a collection that will keep your heart half in your throat and half in your toes, and I recommend it.

Abbey Mei Otis is an exciting voice in contemporary science fiction. Her new book...explores those left behind in typical sweeping science fiction adventures—the children, discarded robots, school dropouts and blue-collar workers with the misfortune of being near something toxic ... dreamy but with an intense physicality that belies the violence behind the longing.

The twelve tales in this collection lure you in with the fantastic (Aliens! Sex Robots! Matricide! Giant Cougars!) and fantastical landscapes. The worlds of these stories feel, in our current climate, dystopian, prescient, and deserved. These are lands of neglect ... these Aliens, dystopian worlds, and unusual children all work as clever feints. They lure you in only to get access to your more tender organs. These are stories of human nature; stories that explore wealth, class, sorrow, oppression. In these stories, aliens can’t save you, the moon can’t save you, virtual reality can’t save you, and, all too often, your family can’t save you either ... there is also tenderness and the absence of it. There is prose that delights. There are plastic people, and people not sure if they can bleed. What these stories do best is sci-fi. What these stories do best is love ... if barriers between what is 'science fiction' and what is 'literature' haven’t already broken down, then this collection is Abbey Mei Otis burying a glowing-neon hammer into that tired beige wall.

Otis is a writer of vision, attuned to the complexities of privilege and the ways technology married to capitalism tends to produce and exacerbate inequality. Like most science fiction, these aren’t tales of the future, but stories about our world now ... Otis highlights the ways technological advancement doesn’t benefit us all equally or in the same ways. These observations aren’t necessarily new, but Otis breathes unique and compelling life into them ... A reader might expect stories freighted with these kinds of critiques to be bleak, but throughout this collection characters find ways to survive in their environments, even if they’re not exactly thriving. In a present where so much writing seems to fetishize an apocalyptic future, Otis’ work suggests that there’s too much uncertainty about what comes next for any of us to say, with any kind of certainty, whether the arc of the moral universe will ultimately bend toward justice or injustice.

The title of Abbey Mei Otis’ first story collection may sound like a cross between a tabloid headline and a cheap horror movie, but Otis actually belongs with writers like Kelly Link, who freely borrow genre materials to construct elegant literary fictions far more about character than spectacle. The title story does involve a virus from outer space that escapes a secret government lab and begins transforming people in a neighboring town, but the focus is on the young narrator and her little brother coping with radical changes over which they have no control. The aliens that show up in other stories are more often benign than hostile ... As odd as these worlds are, they are populated by sharply drawn characters we come to care about through Otis’ luminescent prose.

Many of the stories share an emphasis on physicality and embodiment, whether it be bodies distorted by alien environments or artifacts or people thrown into their own bodies through suffering at other, human hands. Her deft and enthralling writing handles science fiction, fantasy, and everything in between with aplomb ... Otis’ debut is highly recommended for anyone interested in weird fiction, sf, or just a breathtaking reading experience.