Milk Blood Heat.

By Dantiel W. Moniz.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

“Sometimes you must consume the damaged body, digest it cell by cell, to taste the new beginning.”

How much can a short story make you feel before it's time to move on to the next?

Milk Blood Heat brings together a collection of stories set across Florida, exploring women, girls, families and relationships at moments when something in their lives shifts or breaks. The subjects vary considerably, but there is a darkness running through the collection, with grief, faith, sexuality, family, race and difficult relationships appearing in different forms.

As with many short story collections, this was quite mixed for me. There were stories that immediately grabbed my attention and others that I struggled to connect with. Dantiel W. Moniz can create a powerful atmosphere very quickly, and there are some striking and occasionally quite gruesome images throughout, but I sometimes wanted more time with the characters before moving on.

Feast was the story that stood out most for me. Its exploration of a woman trying to live with the physical and emotional aftermath of miscarriage, while her husband seems desperate for life to return to normal, was incredibly raw. The strange and unsettling imagery worked particularly well here because it gave a physical presence to grief that couldn't simply be put aside.

Elsewhere, the collection looks at teenage friendships, religion, abuse, marriage, sibling relationships and the complicated things people can owe one another. There are some really interesting ideas throughout, even when the individual stories didn't necessarily resonate with me personally.

I also wonder whether reading the entire collection back-to-back worked against it slightly. These aren't particularly light stories, and there is a lot of emotional weight packed into them. Giving each one more space before starting the next might have allowed some of them to settle and made the individual characters feel more distinct.

There is no question that Moniz's writing can be powerful, and I could appreciate what many of these stories were doing even when I wasn't fully invested in them. For me, though, the collection was stronger in individual moments than it was as a whole.

A 3-star read with some memorable stories amongst those that didn't quite connect with me. If I were reading it again, I'd definitely take my time and treat each story as its own experience rather than racing through the collection.

Support a local and independent bookshop and purchase the book here.

Purchase the E-Book here.