Review of Bio Melt by Carlton Mellick III

I can still remember all 50+ CM3 books I’ve read, which is more than I can say about Orhan Pamuk or other more critically acclaimed slingers of words. 

I prefer to remember the books I read, instead of letting them fade into a pleasant blur of impressive but barely perceptible subtext.

What constitutes literariness, anyway? Is it MFA precise line editing? Is it voice? Immaculate storytelling? I argue that the purpose of a book is to engage the reader. Many readers will want to get into a story and get out quickly, without having to puzzle over endless compound sentences and dense labyrinths of imagery. Bizarro books are less boring than your average literary fiction novel, more ripe with that stimulating drug of fantasy to make the organ of your imagination tingle more than most contemporary books of traditional fantasy.

This one involves a dystopian world where people undergo procedures to meld together into compound people, combining the mentalities of two or even up to forty people in one body. What results when the protagonist tries to make this life change in the shadiest way possible is an unlikely survivalist body horror novel with surprising backstories shoehorned in for several side characters. It moves at a cinematic clip until the protagonist infiltrates an abandoned corporate skyscraper where it slows down to a crawl for a few chapters. This is longer than his typical books, and similar to Tumorfruit. The author would have made a great horror film writer, but his books are the next best thing, able to do things no film has yet attempted. The stunts are impressive and the set-pieces range from eye-rolling conglomerates of grotesque flesh phalanxes to more mundane horrors. The perspective is close and adds a sense of tension throughout as we follow the gender fluid character’s absorbing feats of adaptability.