THE MEGHAN TIFFT
Meghan Tifft grew up in Los Angeles and Tucson, Arizona. She has an MFA from the University of Arizona and teaches writing at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, where she lives with her husband and her daughter. Her writing has appeared in Fourteen Hills.
FROM HELL TO BREAKFAST
Unnamed Press, 2019
Lucinda’s boyfriend Dracula claims to be the Dracula―he sleeps in a coffin, hunts pigeons for blood, and only goes out at night. But is he really? Unsettlingly, there has been a spate of recent disappearances and Dracula may be connected. Lucinda doesn’t know for sure or which is more dangerous: dating an immortal vampire or a UPS driver with a night shift who thinks he’s one?
While Dracula sleeps, Lucinda works at a smoothie shop where her boss is a creep, and their neighbor is always either belting out Whitney Houston or yelling in Russian through the walls. Lucinda focuses on the play she’s written that’s being produced by the community theatre and a pair of sibling actors, Rory and Lauren, she’s met there.
Rory is clearly infatuated with Lucinda, and while she is out all day Dracula ruminates on next steps. Their other neighbor is a bicycle cop who clearly has it out for him, the landlord claims to have never seen Lucinda, and Lucinda’s brother Warren is constantly asking for Dracula’s help killing birds for his art. As the play’s premiere draws nearer, sinister forces are at work, though it may just be the fault of amateur actors. Meghan Tifft creates an alternate small town America, one brimming with strange delights and dark curiosities, where you can be whoever you want, thought not really, and somebody’s dinner is always another person’s breakfast.
“Tifft delivers the literary equivalent of a fever dream, complete with baroque prose, stream-of-consciousness storytelling, and alternating first-person, present-tense narratives… the tale feels a bit like a play, itself―something on the order of Our Town meets Waiting for Godot as imagined by David Lynch. Questions go unanswered and mysteries go unsolved, but then, that rather seems Tifft’s point. An entertaining if inscrutable meditation on identity and the performative nature of existence.” ―Kirkus Reviews
This is a sharp, head-spinning story about two lovers desperately seeking nourishment. — PW
THE LONG FIRE
Unnamed Press, 2015
*A VCU Cabell First Novelist Semifinalist
Natalie is propelled through life by pica, a disorder that has her eating a wide variety of inedibles—from pencil shavings to foam peanuts to plastic doll parts. A lowly staff worker for the local news, she follows the inane demands of the station’s senile weatherman and comes home to an empty apartment, unless of course her father uses the spare key.
But Natalie’s past stalks her at every turn. With her mother recently killed in a tragic house fire, and her runaway brother, Eliot, missing for years, Natalie and her father Boris only have each other. When a cryptic voicemail implicates her mother’s gypsy roots in her untimely death, Natalie begins to consider the demons that consumed her mother, and drove her brother away. With increasing suspicion, she traces her mother’s mysterious family legacy back to the gypsy neighborhood she left behind.
As a wary Gypsy community tracks her every move, Natalie resolves to confront the dysfunctional and tragic figure at the heart of the mystery: the dead matriarch herself. Smart, elegiac writing, and a page-turning drive, make this a wonderful literary thriller with a hero as intriguing as the mystery.
An unusual, strikingly written novel about a young woman’s desire for understanding and love and how that longing remains familiar in even the most eccentric of circumstances. — Kirkus
“Equal parts funny, bizarre, and emotionally resonant, Meghan Tiffts’ beautifully written and wholly original debut novel tells the wild tale of a woman who will put anything in her mouth. I devoured it.” —Seth Greenland, author of Shining City and I Regret Everything