Sweet Rot by Justine Aimee McNulty

In Sweet Rot, Justine McNulty reveals with insight and precision the big truths contained within seemingly small lives. Possessing an empathy for the animal kingdom equaled only by a keen understanding of the human soul, these stories are idiosyncratically shaped to encompass a boundlessly fuller experience of life as it is lived on our planet than typically depicted in so-called “literary” fiction. It is said that human beings have explored less than five percent of the ocean. Like an intrepid aquanaut, McNulty observes heretofore unexamined worlds with peerless rigor, salty wit, and bold vision. I implore the reader to dive in.

–Luke Geddes – His short story collection, I am a Magical Teenage Princess, has received praise from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi, etc., as well as the authors Chris Bachelder, Alissa Nutting, Roxane Gay, etc. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Mid-American Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Washington Square, etc. His novel Heart of Junk is forthcoming from Simon & Schuster.

Justine McNulty shows great versatility in this first collection, but the inventive, vivacious stories here have much in common, too. Perhaps most conspicuous among the commonalities is an exquisite attentiveness to animals, and to the often bizarre or false forms our interactions with them may take—and to the ways that strangeness is echoed in our (similarly bewildering) encounters with both our families and ourselves. McNulty combines, quite wonderfully, a ruthless eye and a generous heart, and SWEET ROT is a dynamite debut.

–Michael Griffith – Michael Griffith’s books of fiction are Spikes (Arcade, 2001), Bibliophilia (Arcade, 2003), and Trophy (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011), which was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books for that year. He has recently (2018) completed a new nonfiction manuscript, Windfalls in the Bone Orchard, and is working on a novel tentatively called Grimster & the Cruciverbalist.

These wonderful and dangerous stories are full of dark woods, dark water, and beasts of all sorts.  In her terrific debut collection Justine McNulty places her characters right at the harrowing edge of civilization. –

–Chris Bachelder – Bachelder has taught fiction writing and literature courses at Colorado College (Assistant Professor), North Carolina Governor’s School West, New Mexico State University (Visiting Professor), and The University of Massachusetts Amherst MFA Program for Poets & Writers, along with Sabina Murray, Noy Holland and Anthony Giardina. He currently teaches at the University of Cincinnati (Associate Professor).

Justine Aimee McNulty’s stories are haunting and disturbingly gorgeous: delicate, precious pieces of Americana torqued and twisted and submerged until they morph into dark, drowned, lichen-encrusted fairy tales. There’s magic at work here, a kind of subterranean alchemy—reading these stories is like existing inside a mythical world that strangely resembles our own, but brought to life by film director Guillermo del Toro: Norman Rockwell paintings animated in the color palate of The Shape of Water, with murky green caverns and ink-blue pools beckoning from just beneath the surface of every American small town. This is a gothic bestiary in which sea monsters are real and strange creatures do lurk in the forest at the end of your street. These are beasts both common and mythical, living and breathing—or not-living and electronically- or mechanically-breathing as if alive, but not—or dead and sweetly, grotesquely rotting at the bottom of a plastic bucket. McNulty’s human characters encounter these animals in a shadowy, liminal realm between child and adulthood, between the real and the fantastic, hovering just on the edge of their own world and the cusp of another, and compelled to follow their primal desires down to obscure depths where they may well be lost from this world forever, or perhaps somehow magically found in another realm entirely. These are breathtaking, brutal, unflinching stories, echoing the great gothic tales of Angela Carter in a lush, whimsical, and devastating aesthetic all their own.

–Thisbe Nissen – Thisbe Nissen is the author of three novels, Our Lady of the Prairie(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), Osprey Island (Knopf, 2004), The Good People of New York (Knopf, 2001), and a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night (University of Iowa Press, 1999, winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award). She is also the co-author with Erin Ergenbright of The Ex-Boyfriend Cookbook, a collection of stories, recipes, and art collages. Her fiction has been published in The Iowa Review, The American Scholar, Seventeen, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, and anthologized in The Iowa Award: The Best Stories 1991-2000 and Best American Mystery Stories. Her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, Preservation and The Believer, and is featured in several essay anthologies.