Next up in Oni Press‘ summer 2025 graphic novel lineup is Meat Eaters from Black Cloak co-creator Meredith McClaren, and we're excited to bring you an exclusive excerpt before the deadly debut lands in stores tomorrow, July 8.
Described as “punishing and poignant”, Meat Eaters is a visceral story about the effects of trauma and anxiety, following a young girl who finds out that dying is hard, but getting on with it is harder:
Let it be said that dying is rough. Nineteen-year-old Ashley Moore found this out the hard way. All Ashley wanted was to keep her head down and work hard until she could escape the small town where she felt she was stagnating. But after waking up one night covered in blood—and irrevocably dead—Ashley finds her foolproof plan for getting out has gone up in smoke, and something within her has changed.
Without a heartbeat and with a disturbing craving for fresh—preferably bloody—meat, Ashley finds herself privy to a world that exists just beneath our own: a world of ghouls and monsters and things that go bump-in-the-night. Despite her desire to be left alone—and to not think about the night of her death at all—Ashley is slowly drawn into the realm of the unusual, getting advice from ancient vampires, dodging angry pack leaders, and becoming the reluctant big sister to werewolves Motley and Harrison. As she does, she finds it increasingly difficult to put away the parts of herself she wishes to ignore—namely, what happened that fateful night she stopped breathing. The truth, it turns out, can’t stay buried forever.
Speaking exclusively to FANGORIA, McClaren explains more of the inspiration behind Meat Eaters (Googling your symptoms of a mild cold and thinking you're dying? Something we have all surely done, no doubt), which the author describes as “an ode to all the teen horror television I lovingly consumed over the years”:
Google is terrible for figuring stuff out. You grow up your whole life thinking you have an encyclopedia in the palm of your hand. Then suddenly you have a really important question and you get bupkis.
Part of why these pages are fun for me was because I wanted to play with a logical progression of thought. Like, how long WOULD it take you to start considering the possibility that you were dead? And what could reasonably prompt it? Ashley's REALLY TRYING to figure out what is going on, but she's new to the world of the creepies. And just like a lot of folks figuring out important things about themselves, sometimes finding the answers means digging a bit and still not totally getting it.
I really try to make Ashley's train of thought make sense. I imagine it's quite sobering for her though, to be in this not knowing space. I think we've all been in a place where we know something is ‘off' with ourselves, mentally or physically. But it's just ambiguous enough, just far enough out of the norm, that it's hard to find the edges of it.
Read on for our exclusive excerpt of Meat Eaters and grab your copy tomorrow, July 8, from Oni Press.
