Review: Meat Bees by Dane Erbach

Rating: 8/10

By the time Scarlett Sutton arrives at her dad’s cabin in the Smoky Mountains, two locals have already been eaten alive by wasps. Of course, she doesn’t know this yet. All Scarlett knows is her mom finally checked herself into a hospital to take care of her mental health, leaving Scarlett alone with her dad all summer.

After he insists that she get a job, Scarlett accepts a position at nearby Stovetop Outfitters, hoping to spend as much time away from him as possible. She doesn’t expect to trip over a skeletonized corpse beneath the zip-line during one of her shifts—and definitely doesn’t expect to be thrown into a Netflix-style true crime investigation.

The local sheriff’s department is so overwhelmed by these unsolved deaths that when one of the Stovetop Outfitters employees disappears next, Scarlett and her co-workers set out to find him on their own. They discover something much more horrifying: a swarm of yellow jackets stripping the meat off his body. Scarlett never signed up to solve a disgusting mystery, but in order to protect her friends and family, she must defeat the mountain’s darkness and all these godforsaken wasps.

As utterly, gloriously bonkers as its cover and title all but screams, Dane Erbach’s “Meat Bees,” is a Jaws-Candyman hybrid that stuns with visceral imagery and fleshed-out characters, before planting its mandibles somewhere tender. A frenetic, blood-slick read, very much akin to some lo-fi 90s flick, Erbach leans into the absurdity of it all with an unhinged glee, and much like those low-budget B-movies, should you go in, shut your brain off, grab your popcorn, and simply enjoy it for the fun time that it is, you can’t go far wrong. That said, with an anti-capitalism metaphor at its heart, as well as commentary upon parentification, the importance of music and the issue of true crime culture, “Meat Bees,” is not all thrumming wings and little legs and big old stingers- although it certainly doesn’t lack them either. A high-decibel, white-hot, pulpy-with-purpose must-read, you can chuckle and scream and swat for yourself when the meat bees land in August next year from Clash Books.

We follow Scarlett, a sharp-tongued teen who is sent to spend the Summer with her Wilco-loving father in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, The Smoky Mountains. Her mother, who is less than great, is checked into a nearby hospital, which means that Scarlett is just going to have to resign herself to a season of small town living. Her father’s first decree- a job. Motivated by the prospect of her very own jeep, Scarlett takes up a position as Stovetop Outfitters, where she meets Liv, her first quasi-friend, and mans the zip-line. It’s maybe day 2 or 3 when she finds her first skeletonised corpse. When no progress is made by the sheriff’s department and a Stovetop employee goes missing, Scarlett and Liv, later dubbed The Meat Lump Girls, and a couple of others decide to investigate on their own- and what they discover is beyond what 1 million true crime tiktoks could have prepared Scarlett for.

What really rather pleasantly surprised me about “Meat Bees,” was how truly wonderful Erbach’s character work is. Scarlett is a teenager, and briefly we worry that she is the cardboard cutout, an eye-rolling, boy-band-loving adolescent girl who resents her dad and is desperate for a car- and whilst she happens to be all of those things, she is a lot more on top of that. As more is revealed about Scarlett’s mother, we begin to realise the backward gravity of their relationship, a difficult one that along with all of the other really quite interesting dynamics, is written with grace. We get to watch her come of age, and even though we do so whilst she is battling a killer swarm of wasps, there’s something intimate and beautiful and moving about that. There’s probably a metamorphosis bug joke to be made here.

There is predictably, not quite the same level of emotional depth afforded to the wasps (duh) but that is exactly why they’re so incredibly fascinating. “Meat Bees,” is written in a cheeky omniscient third, which is fun because Erbach grants us a glimpse into the machine-like hive mind of the meat bees (which I should say, are nasty yellowjackets, not fuzzy, pollinating, bumbly friends). What makes this, not a slasher, although the vibes are almost there, is the complete indifference our killer(s) have, they have a real absence of malice, and no acknowledgment of any wrongdoing. It’s just motion. Appetite. They are, as you can find out for yourself, individually small parts of something much larger than themselves- a metaphor for society at large, and late-stage capitalism, if, like me, you like to read too far into things. 

Grotesque and brilliant. A bloody small-town romp, “Meat Bees,” is as self-aware and complex as it is utterly and unashamedly ridiculous. Beneath the viscera, the stings and quips and grisly tableaus, however, each cell is sticky with meaning- so whether you’ll be dissecting it as I did, or simply surrendering yourself to the chaotic delight of it all, a good time is pretty much guaranteed. A clever and rather mischievous feeling debut, I look forward to plenty more madness from Erbach.