Family Annihilator

by Calvin Westra

Oen is submitting a story called Family Annihilator, about a guy named Florian making a YouTube series called Family Annihilator. Oen and Lee are in love. Florian and Rosebud are in love. An act of faith and alchemy, a dazzling feat of ingenuity and mesmerism, Calvin Westra writes with the startled confidence of a phenom, the hot-blooded creative fever of an upstart eager to cut a permanent swathe through the culture, and the wryly insouciant wit and inventive economy of a seasoned stylist. His imagination cartwheels past the event horizon where you end and Family Annihilator begins and he seems like a writer who can do anything. Family Annihilator is about the frailties behind obsessive visions. It’s for humans, written by a human, while extraordinarily giving in its deconstruction of personal hardship and artistic travails for unitary communion with revelation. Many books invite you to be adjacent to the process. This is the story of process generously shared in brevity. It relishes the agony of trial-and-error creation like no other, celebrates it, teasing out the joy in not being understood to ferret out the misery in triumphantly connecting to confirm the emancipatory notion that storytelling can be at once incredibly intimate and eerily alien. It restores the promise of queasy fun in discovery. We at expat don’t take lightly your trust and wouldn’t dream of letting you down. Family Annihilator is poignant, our most uncompromising and unclassifiable yet, a hilarious book that will crack you up, a slim sleevehearted treasure to directly affirm the sheer wonder of you, a wonderfully strange hit of the heart from the heartland. The experience of reading should reassure readers starved for sincerity that isn’t cloying, tone-deaf or manipulative. Weirder than alt lit 2.0. Family Annihilator is an autofiction dressed in big ideas bound to seed and germinate spawn perennially. Westra’s characters are written with the most sobering attention to their humanity. A book that is simply good, in a good naturedly uncomplicated, refreshingly unpretentious and unironic way. It is pure love, unassuming surrealism. It will make you wonder why there aren’t more Family Annihilators. That’s because there can only be one, this one, from the mind of a literal genius, Calvin Westra, who writes stories no one else has in them. This book will remind you that reading can be cool in a familiar way while disorienting in the most exotic ways, it’s a meta-seduction worthy of everything being said about it and everything that will be said about it. Another in a continuing series of important contemporary classic literature on home book format, Expat Press proudly presents Family Annihilator, a disarmingly frank experience to cast a cooling glow over the summer. Lose yourself in its kaleidoscope of metaphysical charm. It’s iconoclasm without the baggage, an ode to deep beauty too casually, flippantly dismissed and forlorn these days. Calvin Westra nonchalantly assumes the mantle of formal fantasist of the quotidian alienated creative, of making crazy eyes at you from behind a contactless caress up your spine.

Genres: Fiction

126 pages, Paperback

Published June 11, 2021

Reviews

[Jack Owens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Blown away how Westra can do so much in so few pages. Found myself and people I've known on every page, leaving me both touched and concerned, amongst countless other feelings, because this novella contains such a richness. As soon as I finished it, I turned right back to the beginning and started reading again; the prose is so approachable, but the structure and its contents are multi-layered. Rereading the first chapter alone illuminated just how intentional, how focused this writing is. And it is goddamned funny.

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow this odd novella manages to be written in a fairly experimental style, but also comes off as totally accessible and easy-to-read. I'll forego giving many details, not only might they end up being spoilerish, they might make the book sound pretentious or possibly even worse "mumblecore bullshit." It's not either of those things though, it's actually very funny with some touching moments.

It also made me want this burger.

"I heard about the Destroyer of Worlds burger. It's like nine different types of meat and this special habanero ranch sauce. It's a burger. Obviously. But it has bacon and brisket and lamb and duck and this other stuff all on top of the burger."

"Once you've had one you can't stop."

[brigid masaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

piercing sincerity. a work demonstrating that meta-fiction can be so much more than stuffy masturbating over form. westra's prose is immediately approachable and dripping with a genuine warmth and intimacy not oft found in this genre-space. there's also a lot of death threats against a house cat, an awful school "polycule," some light pants-shitting, and an animal-suit martini party.

family annihilator will squeeze more than a few laughs and at least a tear or two out of you.

[Keith [on semi hiatus] · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thinking I knew Expat Press, I went into this with a completely different expectation on what was being delivered.

I nearly gave up around 50-60 pages in as it wasn't clicking for me, I kept going because Elle Nash's review of "tender/brutal" anticipated the latter half to be giving me what I thought I wanted.

The transgressive I'm familiar with at EP was coming in small waves by ~70 pages in and from there I got it, I understood the book; to quote: "Maybe he's too dumb to get it," and "no, that wasn't it, he was very smart, very well read, very thoughtful about writing."

It feels like EP are trying out new areas that have likely existed for a long time now. I'm familiar with James Nulick, Anthony Dragonetti, Maggie Siebert to name a few, but now, now Calvin Westra is on the list.

I get it.

I got it.

Keep going.

Enjoy it.

[laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well look at me having a crush on someone ive never met because their writing caringly plucks at all my heart strings. Grateful to have read this now and not a moment earlier.

[Liv Archer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this/ had this read to me while I was falling love

[Jesse Hilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

FIRST FLOOR, GOING DOWN

Family Annihilator, a novella by Calvin Westra, is so easy to read that it hardly registers, and yet it is tremendously affecting for the duration that it is around, and just after. I’m going to think about these characters and this story for a while.

The story takes place on two main levels: Oen and Lee are in a relationship, and Oen is writing a story in which Florian and Rosebud are characters, and Florian is trying to create a TV show. The chapters of the novella are mostly short vignettes, and what plot is there, is pretty scant. Oen and his brother have a cleaning service. Lee is an alcoholic woman with bipolar disorder. Florian, the fictional character one layer deep, gets involved with groups of men making pornographic videos of disabled women. His ideas for a violent show get torn apart by people on a presumably online forum for being implausible and poorly written. It’s all rather lighthearted except for the pornography featuring the disabled women, which is mostly hinted at, which Florian is asked to film and edit. There’s lots of comic episodes in Florian’s story, including his attempts to film a scene with humans in animal costumes which goes down in flames when one cast member has a hypoglycemic seizure.

The main character Oen wants to create something fictional: a character creating something fictional. So why does so much of all the layers of story seem so real? Uncomfortably so, at points.

The most sympathetic and 3D character is probably Lee, the girlfriend. She is slated to give a “lead,” or a featured speech at an AA speaker’s meeting. The novella builds up to this and you get a strong glimpse into her history as an alcoholic, which is then compounded when her psych meds run out and she begins to come apart at the scenes. The domestic scenes between these two, even as she gets unhinged, are so sweet and believable, mercifully free of any drama which might show up in a different work of fiction, where most authors would feel they were cheating the reader if they didn’t amp the drama up to 9 or 10 like on some television show. The drama gets amped up here too but it feels real and not like it’s choking you. Nothing about the novella feels like it’s choking you. It doesn’t bury pylons of itself too deeply in you. Depending on what kinds of fiction you read and how frequently this can be a relief or it can be a shortcoming.

I really appreciated the short simple chapters. There was enough space to breathe. I also appreciated that the novella had soul, that it snuck the soul in even in these small bursts.

[Max Restaino · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent. Extremely sweet. So sincere that you feel naked reading it. Funny, sad, violent, and real as fuck.

[David Catney · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Oen would get high or drunk and sit in his room and wonder about cats and their behavior.”

family annihilator is a good book. more people should read family annihilator.

[Jesse Larkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started on Sunday June 11th 2023 and finished on Monday June 12th 2023
Oen is writing a novel called family annihilator, which is about someone writing a tv show called family annihilator.
We follow Oen’s nurturing yet codependent relationship with his girlfriend Lee and her journey of sobriety with AA
His cleaning business venture with his family
We read Oen’s book which entails script excerpts from the fictional tv show
Oen and Lee have experienced familial trauma and neglect in their youth
His book is a way of exercising some of those demons; creating distance between them to understand them as well as existing as an extension of Oen and Lee’s lives together
The characters in the tv show script are in torturous pain and constant peril but it’s often ignored or written off by the laugh track of a studio audience
Through Oen’s book we can make assumptions about his life that aren’t otherwise stated
Tv shows within books within books
Very meta
Very naturalistic slice of life observations
Tight efficient wordplay that gives the reader the space to participate with an image they have to conjure
Easy to identify with
Meditative
Sincere
Pacing, purpose, and momentum come together in a contemplative Ozu-like way
Finished reading and then went right back to the beginning to make sense of the seamless trick the piece had worked on me

[ellen · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book made me hopeful for love and life and the mundane. despite all the awfulness.

[AutomaticSlim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looping book with a story within a story within a story, but not in a messy way.

It made me read the first two chapters again after I finished the book, and I read them with a half smile.

Kind of a little gem here. Definitely going to pick up goines after this.

Round down 4

[justin louie · Rating 5 out of 5]

has an odd structure that sets you up for rereads. "experimental" but unfussy and unpretentious. most of all just fucking lovely.

[Joel Kopplin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect. Read in a sitting and wanted to start it again.

[Worth Car · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe it will all be ok? Or maybe it will never be. Who knows? Got some good janitorial tips

[Ryan Bry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Family Annihilator is a book that breaks down experience with an astonishing but comfortable pungent humor and offers it up in cinematic outbursts. To accomplish such a touching undertaking, Calvin Westra must have an incredible sensitivity to healing—because these scenes feel microcosmic, as if we're given the pieces of each little event, but the whole thing is swirling all around us. I loved the feeling of reading this book, and I look forward to getting more of this in Donald Goines and beyond.

[Toilet Sweat · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don’t want a free hug. I want a stolen kiss. I want you to set that fattie on my face, against my will, and twerk until a turd breaks loose in my mouth and poisons my blood. Wind those dragon balls around my windpipe until I can’t say no and fatten my lips with that incorrigible erection. Elizabeth Aldrich says she’s my friend, but she won’t even rape me to death, so it’s up to you. C’mon, just fucking do it. I’ll give you five stars.

[crowjonah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun, fearless, and motivating. Reading this made me want to do the opposite of annihilate; it made me want to make: art, connections with humans, progress as a person, lucrative enterprises, mistakes.

[muhsina · Rating 3 out of 5]

god.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Okay, I’m going to have to be the one with the unpopular opinion here — I really, really disliked this novella. Character depth was, imo, sacrificed for surface-level wit/humor, and I felt no sense of the scope or significance of the television show at the center of the narrative. While the prose was fine, the connection of scenes I was offered felt like just that — scenes, some topical and some not, rather than pieces of a narrative arc.

By no means am I someone who demands a linear narrative, but it seems to me that some kind of progression toward resolution was what this novella was aiming for. At the very least, it aimed to allow Oren a modicum of clarity about his creative pursuits, his drinking, the trajectory of his life. But the moments in which this was possible — whether via the TV show script or in scenes with Oren as a character — seemed never to quite manifest, and I was left not feeling intrigued/hungry for more but instead as if I was reading a bagel that had been scooped out. This is especially true given that I felt no particular reason to invest in the characters, or imagine / contexualise their lives outside this brief text.

I wish that I had been given a little more feeling, with a little more intention. Maybe more earnestness and less smugness.