The Orange Eats Creeps

by Grace Krilanovich, Steve Erickson (Introduction)

It's the '90s Pacific Northwest refracted through a dark mirror, where meth and madness hash it out in the woods. . . . A band of hobo vampire junkies roam the blighted landscape—trashing supermarket breakrooms, praying to the altar of Poison Idea and GG Allin at basement rock shows, crashing senior center pancake breakfasts—locked in the thrall of Robitussin trips and their own wild dreams.

A girl with drug-induced ESP and an eerie connection to Patty Reed (a young member of the Donner Party who credited her survival to her relationship with a hidden wooden doll), searches for her disappeared foster sister along "The Highway That Eats People," stalked by a conflation of Twin Peaks' "Bob" and the Green River Killer, known as Dactyl.

With a scathing voice and penetrating delivery, Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps is one of the most ferocious debut novels in memory.

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Fantasy, Audiobook, Vampires, Contemporary, Paranormal

172 pages, Paperback

First published September 7, 2010

About the author

Grace Krilanovich has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow, and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Her first book, The Orange Eats Creeps, is the only novel to be excerpted twice in Black Clock.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Envision the largest stained glass scene from the church of your choosing, shattered into pieces no larger than a Kennedy half-dollar and given to you on soiled butcher paper with the instructions to recreate the image with a Slipknot album cover as a guide. That is the equivalent of this masterful, mindfuck of a novel.

This book isn’t for everyone, and I won’t argue with the Goodreads community that pitched it after fifty pages. I experienced long sections of 20-30 pages that I had to reread to keep up with Grace Krilanovich’s frenetic sentences that lay on the page like tattered standards of a defeated army. But the yield for this particular reader was more than worth the investment. It saddens me, the inevitability; this wheel must turn, return. There is no end, only endless endings surrounding us all opines our slutty teenage hobo vampire junky. She haunts the environs of greater Portland, reeling from loss and gain in equal measure.

If heroin-addled William S. Burroughs attempted to write Twilight it might feel something like this book. I like reading fiction that makes me think this gum I’m chewing is tinfoil. I’ll also say that The Believer was really onto something when they shortlisted this book and Dutton’s S P R A W L as two of the three Best Books of 2010. Ideally, these two novels should be read within a short span of the other – they exist as the other’s antipode in a fractured mirror sense; Dutton’s world creates a sense of agoraphobia in its limitless external nothingness while Krilanovich’s teens kick against the goads of their birth town that encases them in “miniature graves” and yields an endless desperation of feckless depravity.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was all voice and far too little of plot, coherent incident or arrangement, narrative development, character, or even imaginative backdrop. Reading it felt like taking a cross-country drive with a junkie who talks the whole way in desperate monotone, never hushing, commenting on each thing his eye lights on, and as it's a cross-country drive, endless things pop up in no apparent succession, with little connection, and no ultimate design.

I have quite a high tolerance for style over plot, yet I found my patience being taxed only thirty or so pages in. I finished solely because I didn't want to break a vow I made decades ago in college to complete every book I begin.

It's not that the author lacks talent or ability, or even that the voice of the book is bad. The problem is that there is nothing underpinning or overarching that voice, which, by the way, is nowhere near as "pervy, unhinged", "new", or otherwise other as the blurbs on the book suggest. This is the work of one more twenty-something trying to epater le bourgeois via the seamy underside of modern life, and baby, that's as old-fashioned as the Victorians now.

I don't think that even the publisher of the book understood it since the description on the cover flaps is about 50% untrue, taking two very minor incidents in the book and acting as though they are leitmotifs and plot elements throughout (viz. the flaps' mention of the Donner Party child's doll and Dactyl [I was about to say "the character Dactyl", but really, Dactyl never appears in any real way and is only adverted to incidentally a couple of times]).

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once upon a time in the Pacific Northwest a slightly fucked up girl escaped her unsatisfying life by starting to run with some vampires. By paring down some of The Orange Eats Creeps backstory you could almost make the sort of basic premise of this novel sound like a delinquent version of Twilight. The vampires (if they really are vampires and not just a teenage affectation, or the construction of the narrators very disturbed mind) aren't beautiful, nor cultured. They most likely smell really bad, like most crusty punks do, they drink too much cough syrup and are tweakers who jump trains and wander around Oregon wrecking havoc at 7-11s and fucking in the break rooms of Safeways. Except for the vampire thing and the setting this isn't a best-selling vampire romance, but one could almost picture poor little Bella as one of the middle-class girls out slumming with the punks who is now passed out on a trailer floor while being molested by some amoral hobo-punk.

The book is the rambling stream of consciousness of the narrator, a seventeen year old girl who has run away from a foster home to find her 'sister', another foster kid who had also lived in the foster home with her. The narrator along with a small group of hobo boys jumps trains, turns tricks in public restrooms, drinks copious amounts of robotussin and stays tweaked out on meth while traveling through the world of 3rd shift 24 hour supermarkets and convenience stores and attending basement punk shows here and there, all while looking for signs of her 'sister' who had run off with another group of hobo boys. The book takes place sometime in the 90's and on a couple of occasions it appears that GG Allin makes cameos as a performer, but it could just as easily be Poison Idea or some other wannabe GG chaos punx. Some of the references seem to be too late in the 90's for GG to be still alive, but my knowledge of the Northwest scene is mostly second hand. The author does a great job though capturing the different factions of the punk world and the feelings that the West Coast had towards their 'meat-head' Eastern counterparts. In the less swirling and insane bits of the novel I felt like the book was being populated with some of the kids from Oregon and Washington I knew when I was very briefly in Berkeley in the mid-90's. The world portrayed here was more outlandish than reality and nothing like anything I'd ever been a part of but at its heart it still reminded me of quite a few people I'd been friends with over the years and the types of people who I 'knew' just because we'd converge at the same shows week after week.

The first third of the novel or so is fairly coherent. It's non-linear but it has signposts anchored to reality and allows the reader to stay pretty orientated. Then it all breaks down. The 'punk-ness' drops off along with the cast of characters, they return every now and then but the novel explodes in a claustrophobic interiority. What had felt like the stream of consciousness of a very fucked up kid who feels like they can never be destroyed turns while she goes about a nihilistic spree of living turns into impressions from the mind of someone who has lost almost all touch with reality. It's easy after reading fifty pages of this to wonder what the point is, where is the author going? There is still an underlying sense of a narrative but the narrators so mentally unreliable that you can't be sure of anything. Is it the robo-mething taking it's toll? Is the narrator just fucking insane? Is anything in the book really happening? Is it just all just a journey through the dark side of the Northwest with it's junkie-suicide rockstars, Green River killers and a landscape that could contain the creepiness of "Twin Peaks"? Is the narrator traveling anywhere, is there even a sister? Was she even a foster child? Everything unravels in the book and continues to unravel and become more and more disjointed and fragmented as the reader turns page after page.

Most of the reviews I skimmed over seem to find the book off-putting. I have to agree. It's 'difficult' but in a way that doesn't hold out the promise of getting something out of the book, or being enriched in someway by it. It's an unsettling book and I think what is most disappointing about the book is that even at the points where the book is at it's most disorienting I kept feeling like the book would pull back from the edge and deliver something more traditionally narrative, or that it would just jump off the edge and fall into the total madness of nonsensical and usually unreadable 'avant-garde' literature. instead there is always something inviting in the book, the book never feels 'difficult' but it also doesn't deliver what it seems to be promising you, maybe sort of like what the kids who populate this book would be like in real life, they aren't really all that deep and weird when you get down to it, but they aren't going to meet your expectations either.

Stephen Erickson wrote the introduction to this book, and he says, "if a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here". And maybe that is part of the discomfort of this novel, it eschews the 'theoretical' that most serious 'difficult' literature is grounded in, and it's written in a manner that makes the reader feel like it should be coherent but instead it goes off on it's own. At times the novel reminded me of Erickson's The Sea Came in at Midnight, but it is only superficially related there.

I should probably rate this book higher. I never felt overly frustrated or hated reading it but I didn't know what to think of it. I think something interesting and exciting might be going on here but I just couldn't find the key to unlock the text and fully appreciate what was happening.

[Jessica Mae Stover · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have never seen a book so vastly underrated on any community review platform. As I write this the aggregate rating is under a 3.0. This isn't "weird fiction," which has become quite a darling of a term in scifi publishing (I like it, too): This is deeply strange fiction, a surreal un-novel about decline, and a total triumph of a work. So here's what happened: NPR placed this book on a listicle (oh good!) but that brought in a lot of readers who are uncomfortable in this lit-punk scene (oh no!), and they reviewed using the star rating instead of simply posting their thoughts and confusion. The result is that they tanked a great book. I despair over the impact this could have on the author's career and future publishing in general.

While GR ratings come with context that we're all wise to by now (fiction assigned in schools will be slightly low, YA bestsellers are gushy-inflated), I've never seen anything like this in all my time here. The inaccurate rating will keep relevant readers away from a very innovative book, because readers do consider the aggregate number to be a sign of quality. Books like these are a good reason for GR to continue to make it possible for readers to review without rating. In this particular case, as an exception, I'd like to encourage readers who wandered through the wrong door to reconsider their approach to posting their thoughts.

If you click through some of the reviews, quite a lot of the high ratings are from reviewers who are trained in the arts: authors, publishing pros, lit majors, librarians, artists. We are trying to tell you something. Is this book for you? Probably not. But it's also great.

Finally, it's not only the book's prose that is innovative. Women are totally locked out of mind-bending, surreal and experimental narratives across media, especially drug narratives, and usually when characters who are girls or women are included in those narratives, they are seen only through the male gaze and/or objectified to titillate the audience, whether it's Marion in the film Requiem for a Dream or the supporting teenage characters (and the objectification in this one is heinous) in the series Euphoria. So yes, it was well past time for a different, better lens on this difficult material. Also welcome and overdue is the serious unromancing of vampire Americana.


2021

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found it made the most sense to read this novel as a series of linked prose poems. The hint of narrative continuity that does exist is likely not enough to sustain a reader looking for 'story,' so anyone who must have that will be disappointed. Situated in the U.S. Pacific Northwest, mainly the state of Oregon, the book loosely follows a group of semi-feral punk vagabonds—who may or not be actual vampires—as they ride the rails and rove small-town landscapes, pillaging convenience stores for supplies and brutalizing random strangers and each other while out of their minds on cough syrup or whatever other cheap intoxicant they’ve managed to procure. Their lives exude futility, nihilism, and an at times charming sort of filthy poeticism. While there is a protagonist (with some shifts in perspective) and she is on some vague, halfhearted mission to locate her foster sister, most of what comprises the novel is a haunting series of sprawling word paintings. Krilanovich’s style is explicitly visceral—bodily functions and fluids routinely decorate its pages. While the idea of depicting a group of disaffected youth roaming wild and wreaking all manner of havoc was nothing new when this book came out in 2010, it’s both the singular narratorial voice and the many encrusted layers of microcosmic detail that Krilanovich has crafted that make the book distinctive. As to its chaotic structure flecked with occasional slices of repetition, it’s worth noting that Krilanovich has freely disclosed in interviews her use of the Burroughs-Gysin cut-up technique (among other approaches) to generate some of the book’s content, which she then edited and reconfigured. Upon its publication the book received a significant amount of media attention, with some reviewers even claiming Krilanovich had [gasp] reinvented the novel. Now, anyone who has read widely in the realm of so-called experimental fiction will likely suspect hyperbole there and as a result approach the book with a wary eye. However, due to the extent of the attention it did receive (e.g., National Book Foundation, NPR, etc.), it’s important to consider that the book likely attracted readers (and reviewers) not particularly well-read in experimental fiction or familiar with the other more obscure media influences Krilanovich has divulged in interviews. Maybe to these readers the book felt sui generis. While I wouldn’t go so far as to label it as such, I do think it reflects an impressive amalgamation of influences that appear to have been run through a rusty meat grinder and then lovingly spread out on the page in an artful manner. Notwithstanding the continuing futile attempts to reinvent the novel by sweaty desperate writers all over the world, I think this is about the best we can hope for at this point in literary history. As always, though, it’s best to meet the book on your own terms.

He sighs and weeps for you. The silent song of feathers spinning solemnly in the morgue moonlight…a grievous roar sounds from high up on a perch in the silence of winter passing into death. You cannot hear it. Just know that it happens and it’s for you—it’s all for you. You keep me alive with the spiral water in the glass. Of night and the water of violence, of longing that will never be forgiven, it marks the glass like acid. There were some whispers among feathers that this was the right part of town for longing. The right time of the day in this death-dappled region of earth. The sun a stone setting on the plate etched to the horizon.

[Sarah Etter · Rating 4 out of 5]

here's a book you have to adjust your brain for. here's a book you have to say yes to and then follow through with that yes.

i understand why it's so hotly contested here - based on all the reviews here, it's clear you either go along with krilanovich or you don't.

i did. but it still took time - i kept having to come up for air from this book. it was harrowing and jangling, like music with a very erratic rhythm. but once my ears and eyes got used to it, it got into my heart.

nothing is easy here - the plot, the language, the visuals, the texture. krilanovich makes you work for whatever you mine from this cavern - and the reward can only be a terrible sense of foreboding, a looming sense of doom or the unshakable feeling of constant loss.

to turn away from those things is to ignore life. to want a book that's tied up nicely and handed over like a christmas gift is to want everything in life to be easy, when hardly one thing is.

the orange eats creeps is a hard thing. i am still digesting it. it is a rock in my chest and i don't mean that in a bad way. it is easier to say this writer or this book is awful than it is to face what's being undone and what's being created and what that means. writing this off is pretending everything is sunshine. and that is a lie.

[David Katzman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost saw G. G. Allin perform. Running late for his gig, I was rolling up to the entrance of Stache’s, the small indie-rock/punk club on High Street in Columbus, when a burst of people stumbled out the door. “What’s going on?” I asked someone who was running by me. “G.G. is naked on stage with the mic cord wrapped around his dick, and he’s throwing bottles and shit at the audience.” I’m pretty sure he meant actual shit.

O-kay. Maybe not so much.

G. G. makes a brief cameo in The Orange Eats Creeps, which is fitting because this is a book of decadence, degradation, abuse, and horror.

The nearest relative to this work is Kathy Acker, who was herself influenced by William S. Burroughs. I found The Orange Eats Creeps to be more closely related to a poem than a novel although there is certainly no exact comparison to either. It has almost no narrative through-line. Chronology and location are generally dispensed with. Disjointed is not the right word because the main character’s thoughts seem to flow from present to past to fantasy and from place to place rather than leaping abruptly. Objects have strange lives and the distinction between metaphor and reality is blurred.

Nominally, this story is about a teenage runaway/foster kid who becomes a “vampire” and spends part of the book hanging with a small group of runaway vampire druggie hoodlum squatters running wild in the Northwest in the Nineties.(Note: They might not really be vampires, and this is nothing like a pop vampire book. Not. Even. Slightly.) Eventually, she ditches them or is ditched by them and wanders on her own spending a lot of time sleeping in forests, in storage rooms, in abandoned buildings or sheds and waking up in the homes of random men who pick her up off the street. She’s seems to be obsessed with her foster sister who may have also become a vampire and be wandering around the Northwest, or her sister may have been kidnapped and murdered. The vampirism might be a metaphor or it might not. The girl’s thoughts are so hallucinatory that much of what goes on is abstracted. She might have E.S.P. Or perhaps, schizophrenia. Characters are met briefly and then disappear. Some of them speak in prose rather than dialogue. It’s unclear if they are even “real” whatever that means in the context of a book that refuses to acknowledge the difference between real and fiction. This isn’t postmodern in the sense of acknowledging the author. The Orange Eats Creeps creates a world where it’s impossible to distinguish whether the character’s thoughts represent reality (within the context of the story), insanity, or metaphor. As metaphor, it becomes more like a novel-length poem than a story although story-like things happen occasionally. After all, Paradise Lost is considered a poem even though “shit happens.”

We are sustained in this morass of despair and violence by the poetic voice and a consistency of tone. Krilanovich’s use of language is rather breathtaking and always surprising. It’s consistently shocking, as well. Without ever specifically mentioning it directly, this books seems to reflect the political sickness of our age. The empty relationships between the main character and everyone she encounters spoke to me of the brutal, heartless nature of Capitalism and how it engenders alienation and the dismemberment of the family. We’re all so busy trying to survive there isn’t any time for real community. The communities shown in this book don’t seem to embody any affection, they are mostly survival oriented—cold, grungy squats filled with sick kids and small, violent gangs that ravage 7-11s for snacks. The main character, at least, doesn’t find any comprehensible emotional connections, possibly due to the inherent patriarchy in the male gaze or possibly just because the world is so owned by Capitalism that trying to subsist around the periphery of it is produces a brutal, pitiless existence. After all, the only food that’s free is in dumpsters.

The narrator does seem to “love” her sister but quite possibly only after her sister is dead. Certainly only after she disappeared. And is it love or just obsession and insanity? Either way, there is a terrifying recognition of the suffering that can be found in the human condition.

Truly original. Rather difficult. Powerfully written. Don’t go into it expecting a story, and you might be enthralled.

[Jack Haringa · Rating 1 out of 5]

Apparently I'm going to need to add a shelf to my list: books I couldn't finish. I guess I'm not cool enough/ punk enough/ young enough to "get" this novel, but it didn't pass my 50-page rule. After some friends and reviews spoke highly of The Orange Eats Creep, I thought it would be something I could enjoy. It isn't. I'm all for non-linear and achronological novels, even angry, wild, fragmentary, or hallucinatory novels, but (big but, here) there has to be some clarity of purpose or sense of motion at least thematically for my to hold on for the ride.

Krilanovich's narrator works from a limited vocabulary and a love of redundant lists, and the prose becomes tiresome rather than hypnotic. The repetition of events, the variations of "slutty hobo vampires" as a phrase (which other reviewers noted), the unimaginative use of profanity all conspire to suggest that this was an idea conceived without a purpose composed by an author a bit too in love with her own voice and perceived cleverness.

Blurbs from Steve Erickson, whom I often enjoy, and Brian Evenson, whom I consider an extraordinary writer, suggest an entirely different book than the one I experienced. I couldn't in good conscience recommend this book to anyone.

[Nate D · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scrappy and wild, but with an overriding post-postmodern intelligence. You could almost jump in and out of this book at any point and have a similar experience of reading: scenes and people move but the iconography and sensation of the work remain deeply, monolithically unchanged. The deep obsidian core of the novel resists any ordinary approach or attempt to penetrate. Despite this, it's easy to get caught up in the exhilaration of the incidental narrative moments, and nothing ever feels unnecessary or repetitious. Everything is cohesive, all points join at the center. It's like a Kathy Acker narrative transmuted into a page turner without giving up any of its purpose or force.

[Brandy Leigh]

Well I for one have never read a vampire story like this one. And I think I hated it.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel is an extremely unique experience - it encompasses the kind of "proletarian punk nightmare" vibe of many other countercultural works of transgressive fiction (Burroughs, the beat generation in general, B.R. Yeager's "Negative Space", and going further back in literary history I even see hints of "Maldoror" in its liberal use of perspective switches), but in my experience nothing else quite falls into the same niche as "The Orange Eats Creeps" does. I experience the text on the page, but only about half of it makes sense - it's like this tangled jungle of images, feelings, people, landscapes and abstract feelings, cohering into some kind of oscillating literary wormhole I couldn't escape from until I made it out the other end, covered in mucky grime. This novel feels like an abstracted view of the middle American nightmare, like seeing the downtrodden and decrepit spaces and people of this country through fractured stained glass - there are images to latch on to but they slip through the fingers like sand, forming some muddy pond of visceral oddity. Complete with pages-long paragraphs and psychedelic syntax screwery, this is the kind of book that's not for the faint of heart or for people who need comprehensible plots to anchor them to a text. Basically, I don't know what the hell this book is, and I love it.

As a result of all this, I approached this novel the way I am currently approaching "Gravity's Rainbow" (which I am reading for the first time) - letting the text wash over me regardless of meaning, losing myself in this swirling torrent of (in this case) smacked out ramblings from its nameless but incredibly compelling protagonist. While this is not nearly as difficult as "Gravity's Rainbow", there's a similar sense of the author refusing to hold the reader's hand, not out of snickering intellectual flaunting (though I don't really mind that either, lol) but because this is something that must function as an experience of abstractions.

But something does cohere in this short but dense labyrinth of text, albeit one that, like I said, still has a tendency to slip through the fingers. "The Orange Eats Creeps" is, ultimately, a story about displacement, of the left behind prowling the underworld of a system that has forgotten them. The homeless "junkie vampires" populating this novel may or may not be actual vampires, but it really isn't the point. We see through our protagonist, a seventeen year old girl who tags along as one of these entities, that there is no place for her - society rejects those of her kind and the system itself is a sort of vampire responsible for creating these stragglers and leaving them to decay. The protagonist's search for her missing sister is one of self-discovery (which coheres in both a grotesquely visceral as well as almost transcendentally metaphysical way in the final act), but it is a journey that leads her further down a heart of darkness, an endless highway of the mind and existing as a disenfranchised entity. Maybe "The Highway That Eats People" quite literally eats them, considering all the bodies she discovers on her pilgrimage - but it is more likely that this is metaphysical, that a journey for the nameless to discover a name is devoured by this systemized inability to find an identity.

The protagonist's relationships to men are also worth noting. She tags along with men "of her kind" (or are they?) who do not seem to have her best interests in mind, and later in the novel there are various scenes cutting to the protagonist waking up in the bed of some new man (or are they the same from before? Really, who is who in this novel is consistently unclear - even the protagonist herself seems to lose what little identity she has from time to time, her narration lapsing and crisscrossing into others in a way making it hard to tell if she's even the one speaking). She seems to become subsumed into the identities of different men - perhaps this is her very own brand of vampirism, to feed from the men that feed off her sexual energy (she's treated often like a prostitute by the men surrounding her). And her relationship to her lost sister, the one she spends a whole novel searching for, seems to speak to some kind of feminine wholeness, like by achieving this goal she will shed the parasitism of those in her past and become a complete person (there's a lot of imagery here of people literally subsuming into one another, a physical transformation as well as an abstract one). Albeit a bleak one, there's a feeling of reclaiming some kind of personhood here, even if the overall result is either hellish or transcendent, with the ending message open to interpretation. There are definite feminist undertones here, the kind of radical, grotesque feminism (but feminist all the same) that understands that liberation and transcendence do not hinge on the comfort of those in power.

For 172 pages, it's incredibly dense and there is not a word wasted, everything contributes to the feeling of being stuck inside this whirling black hole of crusty, punkish nightmares. Part of what's so compelling about this novel is that there is a defined trajectory to its increasing madness, like a train running on its track a bit crookedly before derailing headfirst into the weeds. The first significant portion of the novel is, while odd and full of brambly, bizarre sentences, overall comprehensible, but as the book continues the reader is more and more liberated from sense; it's as if the narrator herself's tenuous grip on reality shifts and morphs as her journey takes her deeper down the annals of her drug-addled brain and the desolate backwoods and streets of a surreal Pacific Northwest. The final third reads less like a novel and more like a prose poem from out of the weary brain of a fevered dreamer, as though Krilanovich shut off the active part of her brain and let her subconscious direct the writing. The last fifty pages or so, taking place on a beach that feels like a negative space between our reality and some alien separate dimension, are incredible, and as a whole really hammer home the feeling of this novel taking place inside some surrealist parallel universe where America is not a tangible place but rather an inescapable, hollowed-out purgatory. For people like the protagonist, and uncountable numbers of people in real life forgotten and disenfranchised by these very systems, it might as well be.

This is a less-than-200-page book with the power of something twice as long, one that sticks to the brain like cough syrup residue or the murky muddy sludge of an Oregon forest after a rainstorm. This is grotesquely underrated, but its because of its grotesqueries that books like this remain underground, ready to burrowed out of age-old dirt only by those ready to tackle the transgressive wildness inside. I do hope the average rating on this site does not deter those who would be interested in this from giving it a look; it's a searing, disturbing, unique novel that's worthy of intrigue and analysis, much more than I have given it here. An essential for fans of oddball fiction with a proletarian focus.

"We receded to the edges of life. Concerned only with seams, borders, rims, outskirts, we took refuge in these places. Where actual life became real. We hid inside you - "

----

7/'22 reread thoughts:

As great a read as it was the first time, and a second read not only strengthens the material already here but also yields new layers to the novel's subtext that couldn't be gleaned from a first read of a book this experimental. It's easy to get caught up in the abstractions and free associative techniques of the novel but this is so much more than even just manic dark prose poetry - it's a haunting, empathetic, and thoughtful journey through the twisted halls of a truly detached young mind, one unbidden - and abandoned - by recognizable society and left to trawl on her own in search of identity, one that may never be attainable due to the structural forces that enable this kind of isolation and destitution in the first place. And crucially Krilanovich effortlessly deflects any possible ableist slant that so many "mentally ill unreliable narrator" driven fiction can fall victim to, because there is such a sincerity and authenticity on display here, as well as a persistently burning core of strength and drive to the nameless protagonist that never abates even when she is victimized and taken advantage of by those that surround her. This has the veneer of a horror novel to mask what is inside - a story of displacement and yearning for identity amidst a world that leaves those who suffer behind, and how those sufferers, in this instance the narrator, must carve out a brutal path for themselves even if it's completely unfair that people with these vulnerabilities must be forced to do so alone. What results is truly one of the most unique inner voices I have ever encountered in a fictional work - one that's uncompromising, alien, difficult to understand but completely sincere and completely true to herself. This is a beautiful, disturbing, mind-bending and radically human story that is so much more than just dissociated nightmare nonsense [which alone would be cool enough, and it is - there's plenty of bizarrerie here to satisfy the visceral brain as well]. I really do think this will end up getting a critical reappraisal one day, because there is just so much here that works on so many levels.

[Jessica · Rating 1 out of 5]

Uhh...I apparently did not get the memo on this book. First noticing it appear on NPR's Best Books of 2010 and then seeing rave reviews pop up on Goodreads and elsewhere made me super excited to read this novel. Plus, it was billed as being about hobo junkie "vampires" running around and causing havoc...how could it not be good, right? So disappointing. Yes, the writing was interesting, descriptive and oddly beautiful, but there was NO STORY. At least none that I could find in the weird ramblings. Had I not read the book jacket, I probably would have had absolutely no idea what was even going on. It was virtually impossible to tell the difference between current time and flashbacks, dreams and reality, and whether things were actually happening to her, someone else, or if it was just completely imagined. I understand that the story is told from the point of view of a drug addict, but apparently the reader must also be hopped up on cold medicine to have any chance of understanding what is going on. That, or my small brain just can't comprehend fiction that is so cool and cutting-edge.

[Melanie Page · Rating 1 out of 5]

I give up.

I understand that Krilanovich is challenging what literature means, what I think of a book. I can only say that a book and a story are not the same thing; TOEC is a book. Honestly, if this work were a short story, I would have more positive things to say (and I would have finished it), and Kirlanovich would have accomplished the same goals, I believe. Instead, by going for 208 pages, she throws challenges at the readers that most of us are not willing to accept without reward. I was reading on a Nook Color, so I couldn't see how many pages were left, but I should have a sense of where things are winding down. It just keeps going.

UPDATE:
Okay, I feel like a quitter, so I'm going to read some more.

UPDATE:
There. I finished the book and moved it up to 2 stars. The ending finally reaches some interesting material, where Krilanovich's tone and style mixed with some sense of logical material, especially when the narrator meets the "warlock." I maintain that this should have been a short story, no more than 50 pages. Also, I wondered if it would have made an interesting hypertext (not the WHOLE work, though). I told my husband that it is very easy to get someone to want to read this book. There is so much quotable material! It's just that none of it goes together or makes and sense in the context of the rest of the book. No wonder all the quotes posted got us all amped.

UPDATE:
I looked back at this post, still thinking about this book over a month later. My peers--intelligent, published individuals who have earned the right to be magazine editors and other publication work--and they all love it. Looking into an interview with G. Krilanovich conducted by G. Blackwell (http://www.hobartpulp.com/website/oct...), I see that she worked entirely with cut-ups, which is fine, but the question did some of it need to be deleted came up, and I couldn't help but think how much more I would have enjoyed this book if it were significantly shorter. Just because it's experimental or an exercise in words, perception, and/or imagery doesn't necessarily mean that people will appreciate it more. This idea has been done before; did she add anything new to a literary conversation? I'm still not convinced, but I still feel my opinion flopping all over the place due to the immense need to conform!

[Billie Tyrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weirdly the fact that this book has a 3/5 average on goodreads makes me want to rate it higher, just to spite the boring people who rate books on their mechanics, and write like they're some kind of expert on the whole act of writing. Like Burroughs, Acker and the best experimentalists this book conjures more of a mood, like it's trying to convey the emotions of an incredibly complicated and often silly painting. Thanks very much to Jessica Mae Stover for recommending me this one, finally gotten around to it and had a blast, and completely agree about how in these kinds of druggy experimental books, often there's no actual female characters who aren't viewed through the male gaze.

[Brent Hayward · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could have been three or four pages long: a stark and hallucinatory piece, a kick to the head. As it was-- though the scene of homeless teens drinking cough syrup and either going to rock shows or trashing convenience stores at night was deftly written-- I became numb and lost interest. The same scene repeated over and over. Forty years ago, this strategy might have been considered groundbreaking; today, not so much. Nonetheless, I plowed ahead, hoping to see why the book ended up on many 2010 best-of lists, hoping that something to marvel at might emerge. No such luck.

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

I used to write for a very cool and original San Francisco zine back in the 1990s called H2So4 that had a killer and lengthy review section. I remember particularly a review of The South Park Movie that said something like "everything great in this movie was equally balanced by something terrible so in the end it kind of cancels itself out." I felt pretty much the same way about The Orange Eats Creeps, although some of those very things that I loved about the novel were also the things that ultimately disappointed me, so the good/bad dichotomy rings a bit false in this case.


What I loved:

This novel is an interesting and very worthwhile experiment in a plotless and a-linear narrative. That's brave and exciting and worth a great deal of praise.

It's a transgressive narrative about kids from foster homes who become hobo junkies in the US Northwest and there just aren't enough books about such people.

Grace Krilanovich writes the most delicious sentences since Virginia Woolf, maybe even better than Woolf herself! Wow!


What kind of cancelled these things out:

Even at a mere 150 pages, a plotless novel can only really hold one's attention if it does something else equally interesting besides plot. Here I kept waiting for that other something and it never quite arrived, rather the scenes seemed to veer toward plot and then back off before linking up, almost as if Krilanovich herself was missing plot but had already decided not to include one. Glancing over the other reviews here I see I'm not alone in this criticism--but I swear it's not because I was yearning for a plot. Still, I did find myself yearning, quite a bit, for something, anything to hold the great sentences, startling images, and interesting scenes together, anything to give me a reason to continue reading beyond knowing there were more great images and sentences to come, but I never got it.


In the end, reviews aimed at possible future readers can really only say one thing: If you like this sort of thing, you'll love it, if not, you'll hate it.

I both loved and hated this and I recommend it absolutely, but not because it's "successful."


PS: Also, for all it's claim to originality, there's nothing here that isn't in Lautreamont's Maldoror--but it's kinda cool that someone updated that little horrific gem and set it in the good ol' U.S. of A. and put us on a par with the trangressive Frenchies.


PPS: Ignore the vampires trope--although mentioned a couple of times at the novel's opening, this motif soon drops away and there's no real Gothic here to speak of and none of the tropes we expect from a vampire narrative. The ploy may have garnered a few extra readers (me!) from including vampires in the novel's publicity, but if you're looking for tradition or even updated vampires or Gothic tropes you will be disappointed I fear.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Orange eats Creeps is pretty impressive debut. A dream vision of 90’s Pacific Northwest filled with wild, possibly vampiric, teen delinquents, strange and visionary homeless and runaways, serial killers, and stranger figures that echoes with the fervent music of basement hardcore, stoner metal and riot girl. Despite its declaration of itself as novel this is more of a prose poem, though I guess you can’t market those anymore. This is too bad since along with the novella it is one of my favorite forms, combining narrative urgency of prose with the attention to language of poetry. Steve Erickson’s intro traces Krilanovich’s influences, which are fin-de siecle decadence, Burroughs and the outer regions of beat poetry, punk poetry, the darker regions of French Literature(Huysmans, Baudelaire, and Celine), but he never mentions the book this most resembles, Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. This book could be considered a strong successor to that triumph of beautiful and evil language. The key to this is language and Krilanovich mostly keeps it strong, relentless, profane and hilarious, and filled with freaky imagery for the most part though I thought the last 30 pages lost a little of this energy. I’m excited for what’s next from this author.

[Ebony Earwig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult to rate book and found myself having to concentrate pretty hard on it, when I think the intent of the author is just to let it wash over you. Though the issue is that I felt like I was missing a lot of stuff by doing so because it's pretty rich and dense. Enjoyable enough and think if I read it a 2nd time my estimation of it would go up.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

review copy from publisher

It's a christmas miracle! For a moment there, I thought for sure that I would never finish this novel. December has been an awful month for me when it comes to reading. I barely had any time to sit down and just get lost in a novel, and when I did find time, this one wasn't really sucking me in - I wasn't "feeling it", and found myself rereading paragraph after paragraph trying to make sense of it all.

Grace Krilanovich is a first time novelist who creates her own form of storytelling in the feverish and incredibly trippy The Orange Eats Creeps. In it, Grace introduces us to a self proclaimed slutty teenage hobo vampire junkie who begins the search for her missing foster sister/lover Kim - driven on by drug induced ESP, random clues at local convenience stores and back alleys, and nightmare dreams involving cat-rat-snakes things. (I think).

She appears to be a loner, bouncing from one group of similar day-sleepers to another, bedding down with strange men in gas station bathrooms, mini-mart storage rooms, abandoned houses, and rail cars along the way. She had a steady boyfriend named Seth at one point, but loses him and his friends somewhere within the story. (I think). There seemed to be an excessive amount of sex - consensual at times, other times taken by force, with one person at times, other times with many...

As she wallows in memories of her House Mom and the evil things she was put through while residing under her roof, her inability to locate Kim, and the senseless acts she puts her body through, she is also pillaging pharmacies for cough medicine on which she gets high. (I think).

To be honest, I am not entirely convinced she is a vampire at all. At least, not in the traditional sense of the word. She eats and drinks, though she seems to mostly throw it all back up, but that could just be due to her completely horrid choice of products to ingest - days old containers of coffee, packets of sugar, and similar other non-substantial goodies. Though there is a fairly decent amount of blood sucking - or, at least, some obvious fetish with blood - I never truly believed that our doped up, strung out narrator was an actual vampire.

A girl hovering somewhere between life and death - yes. An honest to goodness vampire - not so much. For me, it read more like a teenage runaway trying to live the life of a vampire, masquerading around town like a child masquerades around her room in a princess gown pretending to be Snow White or Cinderella.

This book thoroughly confused the heck out of me. Reading like the collected thoughts of someone suffering from an extremely high and delusional fever, most of the story was pure gibberish. If read individually, the sentences themselves were gorgeous and painful and stunning But when laid out next to each other, they meant nothing and made no sense at all.

I felt a bit like Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole. There were moments, little snippets of clarity and lucidity, but mostly the story just left me scratching my head.

Despite my struggle to understand the point behind The Orange Eats Creeps, it's author and publisher (Two Dollar Radio) have made quite the impact on book lists and awards for 2010. Krilanovich was recognized by The National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35", and a finalist for the Starcherone Prize. Reviewers everywhere are praising the hell out of it.

So while it might not have been the perfect book for me, and had me temporarily questioning my ability to read, digest, and differentiate between a good book and a bad book, I suggest you check out some other reviews before siding with me.

However, if you DO happen to read it, and find it as jarring and fragmented as I did, please comment below and share your thoughts. I feel like I need someone to talk to about this one.

I want to thank Two Dollar Radio for making this book available to me for review> Although I did not love the book, I ADORE Two Dollar Radio and their previously review novels (Termite Parade and The People Who Watched Her Pass By). I am very much looking forward to starting their novel The Visiting Suit - up next!

[Sheba · Rating 1 out of 5]

I picked up this book truly hoping that someone, particularly a woman, had cracked open what has become the often vapid vampire novel market with an experimental, high-art take. It wasn't until after I began reading it and was looking for perhaps some missed insight that I read the reviews. Lots of comparisons are bandied about between Krilanovich and "the experimentalists" (Burroughs, Acker, etc). Perhaps that's appropriate, as it takes a certain kind of reader to appreciate those kinds of writers. What "The Orange Eats Creeps" will read like to non-fans of the experimentalists is a collection of metaphors assembled, albeit lovingly by Krilanovich, into a kind of disjointed madness travelogue. Not being a fan of those aforementioned experimentalists, I found the book contrived and more reminiscent of goth-minded folks in writing workshops who compose thinly veiled and annoyingly affected diary-like fantasies of their basest or derivative thoughts. It was also reminiscent of those moments when I as a reader had the negative voyeurism effect that often comes when reading the experimentalists. That is to say, unlike Nabokov, who was such a master of his craft that he could make a pedophile organically complicated and incongruously, nauseatingly, charming, it's difficult to care what happens to the narrator in "The Orange Eats Creeps." This seems to be a dilemma of many modernist and post-modernist experimentalists like Selby, Thompson, Burroughs, Acker, Wright, Joyce, etc. I found no desire to attach myself to the main character's journey, no reason to follow the maddeningly indulgent narrative outside of an intellectual exercise. Something is missing, and it cannot be fixed by inserting in a neat little problem by name only, as Krilanovich does with the missing sister and the foster care system experience of both girls. I very much wanted to care about these aspects, but these elements didn't feel real so much as they felt constructed to justify a character's flaws, ala Reality T.V. If I can't feel for the narrator, all of his or her problems are just added to the pile of nonsense. I don't have to like the narrator, I don't have to fully understand their behavior, but I should feel something other than negative voyeurism. I also got the sense in "The Orange Eats Creeps," as I did with many of those other experimentalists, that the author was more interested in telling a story in an interesting way than in a story being heard or communicating a story. It's a subtle difference that has a massive effect on the reader. Does the author care if I get off or is the author more interested in masturbating in front of me? It wasn't a residual of the non-linear stylization that made me feel this, so much as it felt as though the writer wasn't fully allowing me as a reader into the story without her consistent presence. I could feel the writer writing it more than I could hear the story. I made it 50 pages in before I became exasperated with the overadornment of pretty, but ultimately vacuous use of metaphors, the heavy-handed forced disrupted narrative, and maudlin pandering of the affected narrator.

[Anita Dalton · Rating 2 out of 5]

The plot, such that there is, follows a small gang of young men and the narrator, our fucked-up heroine, as they wander about aimlessly and purposelessly. The heroine wants to find her sister Kim. They were in a foster home together and Kim took off and joined her own gang of “vampires.” The search for her takes place mainly in the heroine’s mind, but Kim occupies a lot of her thoughts. There is a passage in the book that can lead the reader to believe that there is no Kim, or that the narrator is Kim. If either is the case, then this really is a book without a plot, and simply an examination of a seriously fragmented mind. That is not a condemnation because these sorts of mental examinations can be very interesting.

But the heroine’s thoughts, her filtering of events in this book, are ultimately what made this book intolerable to me. I don’t know if I would have felt this way had I bought this book knowing what it really is. But I can say that even if I had known what I was in for, I still would have found the narrative bereft of meaning. Perhaps that was the point, and if it is, then clearly this was not going to be my cup of tea. It’s just one event after another, sometimes events within events, the past bleeding into the present with no clear delineation between the two, with no linear continuity, spewed forth from the mind of the heroine. This narrative is what I imagine my brain would be like if I were punched over and over in the face, unable to respond before the next punch landed. Read my entire discussion here.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The recommendation engines thought I would like this book. They kept putting it in my face until I finally caved and read it. I hate to admit it, but they were right. It's my kind of book. On its face it is a hallucinatory story of teenage vampire hoboes who leave a swath of destruction in their path as they swagger along invincibly in a world of bloodsucking, sex and drugs. But as I read along I began to feel that the crazy science fiction story was only metaphorical and that this is really a story of a sad teenage runaway girl in search of her probably killed sister. She has a fantasic imagination that cushions the pain and a bravado that keeps the exploiters from exploiting her too much. The idea that as a vampire she is immortal and invincible is really just the way we all foolishly saw the world as teenagers. We didn't need to be vampires to think and act that way. The possibly real story behind the fantasy adds a strong note of poignancy, but doesn't destroy the fun of the mad roller coaster ride that the reader gets for most of the book.

[cycads and ferns · Rating 4 out of 5]

She was immortal but it seemed to me that she kept trying to kill herself. Her sister was all that mattered to her but I was never convinced of that attachment. And yet when the end came, I was not ready for the magnitude of the loss.

“I picked her up and carried her out of that place, gathering her up and hoisting the clacking mass up onto my back I walked out of that little shed….It appeared as if her mind was still intact even though I wore her body like a bloody backpack….She felt like nothing, pieces of her flesh hanging off here and there as she wiggled around my shoulders. "I'm taking you away from this place" — I walked across the night, into the next town, and it became more difficult to make steps forward as the grade rose and fell unpredictably….Several days later arriving at the Greyhound station in Eugene, I sat her in a pile on a bench while I loaded what little else I had with me onto the bus. The doors closed behind me and the bus lurched forward. Frantic, I pleaded with the bus driver to stop so I could get her but he didn't hear or didn't care and wouldn't stop the bus so I could get off. We drove on. I couldn't get off the bus or do anything about it. She stayed out there waiting for me.”

[Killian · Rating 4 out of 5]

it’s a lot less “totally out there acid trip weird” as i thought it was gonna be (the Twin Peaks comparison is misleading) and a lot more “doing drugs and hooking up in gas station bathrooms.” that’s the vibe of the book & this book is basically just straight vibes no plot all the way through which i do not mind at all bc the vibes were on point & very consistent especially in the prose

basically if they let Johnny Truant from House of Leaves write a whole book on his own, this would be it

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Orange Eats Creeps is not very story-oriented; rather, it's oriented around its own crust-punk style. Your enjoyment will come from whether or not you can get into Grace Krilanovich's schizophrenic writing, as opposed to whether the story or characters appeal to you. As a result, a lot of readers are going to find it nearly impenetrable. The narrator hallucinates, dreams, has flashbacks, and even flash-forwards in quick succession without telling the reader. Time and space continuously shift, illustrating the narrator's tenuous connection to reality. Her motivation of finding her runaway foster-sister/lover is often forgotten as she gets caught in hallucinogenic fugue states or follows carnal desires. Krilanovich's singular style makes the most mundane environments seem post-apocalyptic. She also puts an impressive amount of humour into the book. I laughed often while reading passages like: "During the fourth song he puked on the microphone, singing a spout of bile onto the audience in front of him," or "You can get away with anything when you're wearing an apron...go to a motel, take all the brochures, nod to the office person and leave. If there's trouble, point to the apron and bail."

Every once in a while you'll get a stretch of lucidity where the events are easier to discern, where you form a connection to the protagonist. The last 30-or-so pages where she comes to a beach and confronts her own motivations made for a fantastic ending. Much of the book's strongest moments, however, come in snippets rather than long sections. You'll get the most out of it if you take your time reading and re-reading to penetrate the chaotic words and parse out the meaning. The Orange Eats Creeps is ugly and deformed, but it's beautiful nonetheless. My only complaint is that the main premise is so intriguing that I wish the author had been just a little more linear in order to flesh it out a bit better. However, I realize her intention was to deconstruct conventional storytelling, so I can't complain too much. I'll end with a quote to show what kind of book this is:

"The surveillance video showed them scraping some girl off the pavement, somewhere
halfway around the world. Militiamen do a dance with shovels. It looks like the whole place would
smell like plastic vomit. They stuff the girl in the back seat of a car and drive away. The news footage dramatically fades to red and the anchor makes some kind of joke about murder being “radical” again. I think the word he used was actually “rad.” If anyone hasn’t guessed yet, there’s a fucking war going on.”

[Matt Leibel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh man, I think I was supposed to love this one--Steve Erickson who intros it in (typically) hyperbolic style is probably my favorite living American novelist, and it got hyped on various litblogs that I also enjoy. Plus I like a hallucinatory style in general, and am intrigued by the kind of "European novel" that one of the blurbs compares this too. But the whole teenage vampire slut thing--the vampire metaphor was a little too forcedly metaphorical (they're really just runaway teens), and the sex stuff just got numbing and repetitive, as sex stuff in novels tends to do. The whole thing got repetitive, actually--wanted a sense of progression or a more compelling justification for its lack thereof. Sometimes repetitive to an extent is good, strategically used it can make the writing more lyrical, musical, interesting. Javier Marias's recent trilogy was a masterful example of that, I think. But I thought it fell kind of flat here, despite some good stretches of surreal prose.

[M · Rating 1 out of 5]

Grace Krilanovich pens her junkie vampire tale with an emphasis on Dadaist literature and psychopomp pacing. Initially setting the stage as a search for a missing foster sibling, Krilanovich's teenaged vampire protagonist explains her affectations for railways, meth, and attention. The addition of a subplot involving a serial killer and an unresolved quest blend into a stream of consciousness so verbose that the author (and protagonist) lose sight of their intentions. While a verbal tour de force that serves up surreal imagery, this might have been better off as poetry rather than a so-called novel.

[Craig Vermeer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sometimes you read a book and you want to approach the author and, inconspicuously, draw them off to the side. You'll look them earnestly in the eye and, maybe look around to make sure you're not drawing undue attention, and say to them "Dude. Are you... okay?"

[Maya Becker · Rating 2 out of 5]

The imagery was beautiful and the grime so well established. But the writing was impossibly hard to follow. I don’t even think it is supposed to be a follow-able book but I didn’t enjoy that. It made me not like the book. Bc purely i didn’t even know what I was reading unfortunately

[Andrea · Rating 2 out of 5]

Too esoteric for me. Felt like the same convoluted things kept getting said over and over again. It’s a shame because the synopsis sounded good.