Margo Lanagan - Tender Morsels

Praise for Tender Morsels

a density and moral complexity almost suggestive of a George
Eliot novel, with its decades-long narrative arc, its shifting
relationships, its questions involving responsibility,
misdirected love, and the nature of families.

GARY K. WOLFE, Locus

Lanagan employs a preternatural command of language, twisting
it into archaic and convoluted styles that release into passages of
absolute, startling clarity. Drawing alternate worlds that blur the
line between wonder and horror, and characters who traverse
the nature of human and beast, this challenging, unforgettable
work explores the ramifications of denying the most essential
and often savage aspects of life. a marvel to read.

IAN CHIPMAN, Booklist

Lanagans poetic style and her masterful employment of mythic
imagery give this story of transformation and healing
extraordinary depth and beauty. Lanagan offers up
difficult truths and complicated, human characters
that are as sobering as they are triumphant.

DEIRDRE F. BAKER, The Horn Book

Praise for Black Juice

I want to hire a plane and write Black Juice across the sky so that
people will read these intense, rich, disturbing stories. This books
extraordinary, very strong; I havent read anything like it before.

JOHN MARSDEN

superbly unearthly tales Lanagan is in a class of her own.
Every story in this book is a wonder: Lanagans range of invention
is breathtaking, her assuredness and unerring tact a joy to savour.
This is one of the most imaginative and attractive collections of
short stories to appear in more than a decade.

MICHAEL SHARKEY, Weekend Australian

dazzling imaginative reach dark humour subtlety
humanity and depth of feeling rich, strange, wonderful and
compelling. Margo Lanagan is an enormously talented and skilful
writer, with a powerful and original imagination.

GARTH NIX

Lanagan uses fantasy to highlight certain universal truths about
human relationships. Her imagination is a powerful beast,
encompassing clowns and angels, dreams and nightmares
mostly nightmares. She writes with wit and debauchment, and a
certain exuberant ruthlessness. It cries out for a sticker
If you like Angela Carter.

KATE SAUNDERS, The Times

The genius (not too strong a word) of Australian writer Margo
Lanagan is her ability to reach into darkness and return with
something both different and powerfully convincing.

FAREN MILLER, Locus

Always moody, evocative and original, Black Juice is an intensely
imaginative collection from an accomplished and distinctive author.

The Age

With enormous skill, Lanagan disturbs as she entertains, stimulating
our minds and playing havoc with our hearts. Black Juice is a feast of a
collection by a daring and talented writer.

Good Reading

Margo Lanagans short stories are like funeral flowers, beautiful and
terrible at the same time (they) tell us something about what
makes life worth living, even in the darkest times, the black juice
times. Margo Lanagan is a dark magician, and potentially dangerous.
Enter her fantastic world with care, but do enter it!

Spress Magazine

something else again inventive, intriguing and extraordinary
in their power. story after story astonishing, gripping and
multifaceted. Ive rarely been so touched by any writing.
What a remarkable gift!

Magpies

Praise for Red Spikes

Driven by beautiful, often quirky language and deep psychological
insight, these works demonstrate a powerful sense of the marvellous
Gritty, dark and sometimes very nasty, these stories are, at their
best, worthy of comparison to the fairy tales of Angela Carter.

Publishers Weekly

Lanagan has an extraordinarily dark sense of humour and takes
obvious delight in subverting our expectations.

Bookseller & Publisher

Highly imaginative disturbing in their oddness Every story
is unexpected. Lanagans books are to be approached in a state of
fearful, delighted anticipation.

Australian Book Review

I was astonished by Red Spikes The inventiveness, variety and
quality of each story are extraordinary Lanagan seems to have
tapped into a bottomless reservoir of inspired creativity,
each piece a unique gem.

Viewpoint

An extraordinarily dense compilation of philosophical ideas and
meditations on the precarious act of living and the dark beauty of
dying with dignity, [these stories] thrill with the epiphanies we have
when life suddenly reveals its grandeur. They offer astounding
insights into worlds just beyond our line of vision the worlds
conjured up in dreams which reflect our real lives so devastatingly.
Greg Bear says they are like a memory of the real. See the world
through Lanagans eyes and it will never look quite the same again.

ROBYN SHEAHAN-BRIGHT

Tender Morsels

ALSO BY MARGO LANAGAN

White Time

Black Juice

Red Spikes

Margo Lanagan

First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin
First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf,
an imprint of Random House Childrens Books,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Copyright Margo Lanagan 2008

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Lanagan, Margo.

Tender morsels / Margo Lanagan.

ISBN 978 1 74114 796 4

A823.3

Set in 11.5/14 pt Goudy by Midland Typesetters Australia
Printed and bound in Australia by Griffin Press

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my sisters, Susi, Jude and Amanda

There are plenty would call her a slut for it. Me, I was just glad she had shown me. Now I could get this embarrassment off me. Now I knew what to do when it stuck out its dim one-eyed head.

She were a revelation, Hotty Annie. I had not known a girl could feel this too. Lucky girls; they can feel it and feel it and nothing need show on the outside; they have to act all hot like Annie did, talk smut and offer herself to the lads, before anyone can tell.