... Meijer strips away the masked murderers and demons to return horror to its foundation—two characters intertwined by their desires, written to its surreal and, at times, deadly conclusion ... Meijer’s short stories operate under an atmosphere of threat, her close-to-the-bone writing style crafting a sparsity from which its most unsettling aspects emerge. Like the quiet, dread-filled tracking shot which proceeds a film’s jump scare, readers are willed to lean forward into fragmentary passages in order to parse every image. Precise in her language, Meijer lingers on depictions of the body, oftentimes at its most uncomfortable, yet the rest of the world remains shrouded ... Meijer carefully balances elements of tenderness and danger, creating a tone that tempts readers to imagine the potential for connection while anticipating the ever-ominous possibility of calamity ... proves itself to be a delicate balancing act between classic and reenvisioned horror. The collection maintains a precise attention to pace while removing the tropes that would prematurely tag itself as horror. While it is at times gruesome and shocking, it forgoes gratuitous gore. Meijer tilts the axis of her world ever so slightly, turning the familiar into the unsettling, characters into monsters, and genuine expressions of love into pain. The collection’s most unnerving moments, then, are those that most closely parallel the human while severing its humanness, creating a dark portrait of the recognizable and destructive desire for empathy. While this surreal shift becomes clear with time, the readers who first pick up Rag may find themselves in true shock of the horror that emerges from its beautiful prose and haunting characters.

[Meijer's] stories are fabular, which imbue readers with the expectation of a moral. But like the work of many moralists before her, Meijer’s is emotionally riveting precisely because no lessons or precepts ever come: she fashions her fiction as a photonegative of the world she believes that people should live in, her neighborhood a grimy suburb of empty streets, violent homes, veiled feelings and unrequited obsessions ... undoubtedly one of Meijer’s greatest assets is her ability to animate the ins and outs of the male psyche ... Rag is more claustrophobic than Meijer’s previous books, by far her most brutal, and also her most sophisticated and technically self-conscious. In multiple stories, Meijer tricks her readers into believing male narrators are females. Admirably, she wields her mastery of conventional craft for repetitive, blunt effect, an approach that intentionally suffocates the reader with horrific reality.

... a disturbing, forceful story collection ... sharp, haunting ... [Meijer] writes wonderfully of the trap of the self, with its impossible prisons of circumstance and identity, not to mention the perversity of being buried alive, alone, inside a body ... At times the book delivers more spectacle than impact, and risks projecting a gothic mood untethered to an interpretive framework. But Meijer’s willingness to write fiercely into the abyss deserves respect, and maybe the darkness of the untethering is the point, or at least an accurate depiction of life’s obscenities. Any one of us may know unendurable affliction without the means to comprehend it.

eading Maryse Meijer's short fiction is transformative. Stunning and evocative, Rag's 14 stories dazzle with brilliance while taking the reader's heart and wringing it dry--but not before delivering a solid literary punch ... Meijer is wildly innovative with her fiction and doesn't limit herself to exploring connection from solely a human point of view ... Deliciously manipulative and psychologically haunting, Rag signifies Maryse Meijer as a master of the short form who consistently shocks and connects by delivering the unexpected.

The male characters Meijer conjures face each unfolding horror with enigmatic stoicism, as though toxic masculinity is a new, unheard-of experience. The sudden disgust is perplexing, but Meijer’s collection is definitely affecting and timely.

[Meijer] has a gift for writing sharp, vivid stories that are strange and horrifying in the most delightful way ... fans of Meijer won’t be disappointed by Rag, which is even better — and darker — than her debut collection.

With terse, dark prose, Meijer has created a cohesive set of stories which seem to delight in exploring taboos and destroying expectations ... These stories are unsettlingly honest, with the most twisted inner thoughts of each principal character laid bare for the reader. Rag is at its strongest when delving into the minds of its uniformly flawed narrators ... The haunting, beautifully horrific stories in Rag linger long after finishing the collection, and subtly answer almost as many questions as they raise about what it means to interact with and be a man in the modern world.

These stories are dark, aberrant, and garish, in the lovely way that Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat is dark, aberrant, and garish, but what is more striking is how deeply observant and compassionate Meijer is with her characters, even the worst of them. Striking too is her prose, which is studded with beautiful, searing lines ... Maryse Meijer’s Rag asks us to pay closer attention to the everyday stuff of our lives—from mundane objects to less tangible things such as pain, loneliness, desire, and masculinity—to how we use these things, how we render them into weapons.

While at times her narrators can seem almost excessively cruel, Meijer's stories are an indictment of the indignities women—and other men—face every day as they dodge or appease the dangerous impulses and appetites of misogyny ... A rich, beautiful, and utterly terrifying book.

Outstanding and disturbing ... [Meijer,'s] fragmented writing style produces an intense and distilled view of isolated moments—or, conversely, makes the outrageous or aberrant seem ordinary. The use of short declarative sentences, sparse adjectives, and lack of quotation marks furthers this splintered effect ... Though reminiscent of Mary Gaitskill, Jean Rhys, and Muriel Spark, these 14 stories bear a powerful style that is Meijer’s own.