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A review by briandice
The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich
5.0
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.
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.