The Orange Eats Creeps

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.

"A posse of ravenous teenagers rampages through Krilanovich's slyly arch debut, devouring and destroying everything unfortunate enough to be in its path. Creatures of enormous appetites for sex and food and diversion, they're 100% id and described by the unnamed female narrator as 'Slutty Teenage Hobo Vampire Junkies,' though their vampire bona fides are a matter of question. The story careens from encounter to encounter, bursting into vibrant tableaus of images and barrages of prickly observations ('Death is sewing a calico dress next to a fire in the ground. Do you dare approach her, little boy?') that, for a while, stand in for plot. As they accumulate, a pattern emerges of a relatively ordinary life rocked by unspecified cataclysmic events--probably war--while, in her roaming, the heroine intermittently searches for and laments the loss of a surrogate sister named Kim until a final confrontation with a warlock brings closure to the story, even as it raises more questions. Krilanovich's postmodern mashup is refreshingly piquant and playful, reminiscent of postmodern Euro fiction and full of poison pill observations. (Sept.) While there is an undeniable similarity between this long novel and another popular series featuring an adolescent protagonist who, along with his friends, gets into all kinds of mischief at a haunted boarding school, the two works couldn't be more different; this is a decidedly adult novel. The primary plot charts the brief life of 14-year-old Daniel 'Skippy' Juster, a student at Seabrook Academy, an elite junior high school in Dublin. Skippy is smitten with Lori, who attends the neighboring girls' school, but has a problem: Lori's sort of boyfriend, Carl, is a sociopathic drug dealer. Another major narrative follows Skippy's history teacher, Howard 'The Coward,' a man equally infatuated with WWI and Miss McIntyre, a fellow teacher. With dark humor, Murray examines adolescent sexuality in an age of texting, video games, and the casual use of pharmaceuticals. Murray nails the banter of junior high, the nuance of middle-age yearning, and the excitement of string theory, and shows mastery in weaving disparate elements into a cohesive and engaging narrative. This is one of the darkest and funniest novels in recent memory. (Sept.)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright PWyxz LLC)

"Like something you read on the underside of a freeway overpass in a fever dream. The Orange Eats Creeps is visionary, pervy, unhinged. It will mess you up." Shelley Jackson

"The exhilaration of such a novel is nearly beyond calculation. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here." Steve Erickson, from his Introduction

"Reads like the foster child of Charles Burns' Black Hole and William Burroughs' Soft Machine. A deeply strange and deeply successful debut." Brian Evenson

"Refreshingly piquant and playful, reminiscent of postmodern Euro fiction and full of poison pill observations." Publishers Weekly

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.