Grace KrilanovichCritiques

This was powerful and raw and sometimes kind of gross and often depressing but alternately funny and nearly always surreal and beautiful. It's essentially a stream of consciousness narrative written by a homeless teenage junky (vampire?) who might be hallucinating supernatural experiences or might just be using them as a poignant metaphor for being young and hurt and lost (or might as well as anything just be as real as any of the other nightmarish experiences that are more rooted in "reality")

Krilanovich takes as the vehicle for her prose the adventures of a gang of teenage runaways and dropouts in the dank and druggy Pacific Northwest, so characters and plot are less relevant than daydreams, nightmares, hallucinations and psychogenic disorientation. A sensual, bewildering, devouring read.

The language is a beating, serving no purpose other than ... no, just no purpose.

The characters aren't characters, and the story is no story. Borders on tone poem territory, in prose.

A slog all around.

OK, I really, really tried to get through this. But I am not going to be guilt-tripped or pressured into thinking this is some great work. It's weird and it has some scary imagery, but I agree with another reviewer who said he thought the author is a bit too in love with her own words. I'm done. Smell ya, Vampire Teen Hobo Junkies. I just really don't care where Kim went.

I circled huge chunks of this text. Pages.

On a recommendation I no longer recall, I attempted to read Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. If I recall correctly, I at some point looked up notable works in the surrealist genre and this came up. Unfortunately the writing was so absolutely awful that I could not go very far into it. It was just so very dull, and painful. To give you an idea:

What would happen if you harnessed the sexual energy of hobo junkie teens?

I dunno. Probably nothing, because sexual energy can't in any way be harnessed. But I gather what you are going for with this little line, and I will leave that point alone. But I am curious, must it be precisely hobo junkie teens that we extra this energy from? Would this energy differ in any way if it was simply a teen that was traveling around without a home, but hadn't quite gotten on the H train yet? Or what if the energy was coming from a teen with a good home and doting parents, but just couldn't get off the good old China White. Or what if we have a hobo junkie, but he's gone on in years, is getting a little more mature, has started think about his homeless and addicted future? What I am asking, I guess,, is which of there three words strung together is relevant, or are they all just word count fluffer?
One more, just for the fun of it.

I'm only severeness. That means I grew up in foster care and I'm really fucked up because I don't know right from wrong.
Is that so? I was seventeen once too, so I guess that means that I too, at least for that year, grew up in foster care and was then really fucked up, therefor didn't know right from wrong. I'll have to double check with my parents, I recall something about them being there 'round that time. But come to think of it, I got some friends, and they too were once seventeen, but none of the rest of that shit seems to apply. Some of them, as it were, didn't know right from wrong despite having normal parents. It's almost like this line is utter nonsense.
Jokes aside, it was rather trite.½

I am not sure what genre this really falls into - it has vampires, but that does not seem to really be what it is about, and I am not really sure they are indeed vampires. The storyline is scattered all over the place and feels like you have to be in an altered state of mind to understand it.

Incredibly dark, graphic, and poetic. The prose was great and every sentence seemed to flow perfectly. This book had more of a feeling of a memoir then a novel, or maybe it is more similar to spoken word poetry. There is no story arc and there is very little dialogue. It is the protagonists stream of consciousness, that at some times has a theme and at others seems to be more chaotic. I enjoyed the book for the language, but it was not at all what I was expecting.

idgi

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.

I won't give The Orange Eats Creeps a rating because that wouldn't be fair. I'm pretty sure I'm not the target audience. (It would be equivalent to a blind man judging a beauty contest.) I like to read books to enjoy both good writing and a good story. I savor the blend. This had great writing, for sure. Truly sublime writing. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find any sentence in these 170+ pages that doesn't scream brilliance (often: intense brilliance), but there is barely a story to be found here. No real plot to tie all of those sentences together. As such, you could almost read these pages in a random order and get the same effect. This is closer to poetry than prose, which may have been the point, and thus I have wandered accidentally into an audience of not-my-peers. As far as this "novel" goes, I didn't care for it. It failed to live up to half of my expectations. But I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy this type of thing immensely, although, probably, not many.

N.B., I will be very curious (and interested) to see what Grace Krilanovich does next. She could easily head off in a couple different directions from this starting point, and I'm confident that no matter which she chooses, she will be amazing (to someone). If she chooses to wrap that brilliant writing around even a half-way decent storyline, I'm going to be very excited.

This book had some wonderfully hallucinatory prose, but ultimately it felt quite repetititive to me. I live in the Pacific Northwest, and I work in an independent bookstore, so I know that vampires are all the rage out here in this dark and damp environment. But this tale just didn't have enough of a storyline for me. I felt like I was reading disjointed excerpts from Grace Krilanovich's teenage diary from her years in a foster home. Maybe I needed a few doses of cough syrup to really enjoy this story, but since I was fairly clear of mind when I absorbed it, I would have to honestly say The Orange Eats Creeps failed to impress me.

Love it. Passages in here make me wonder if the author has visited my nightmares--or have I simply seen what she's seen, out train and car windows, down at the 7-11 corner, or we've dreamt similar dreams of what is plainly real and self evident: the limitless orange light of American sprawl at night; a neon hell worth visiting for an afternoon; a chaos of materialism and hollow dreams that gather like silt in the creek behind the truck stop; teenage vampires (they are all vampires, don't you know?) sucking a culture with no blood and loving it. This is a novel worthy of Alice In Wonderland, On the Road, anything Burroughs has written, and the very best of B horror movies. Amazing this is her first... I understood what was going on about half the time. Makes me want to read it again. Fuck yeah.

Challenging, a long slow walk through the darkest parts of our anti-heroine's mind. By turns laugh out loud funny, horrifying and mind numbing. It took me weeks to finish, but I never felt like giving up. I love Burroughs and some of this is reminiscent of the "routines" in his work. I can't compare to Kathy Acker because I found her books truly impenetrable, at least "Pussy, King of the Pirates". Steve Erickson raves about it, and if you like his work you'll probably find something to interest you in "Orange".

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: http://ireadoddbooks.com/the-orange-eats-creeps-by-grace-krilanovich/

Wow.

Did you know that Kathy Acker and William Burroughs had a love-child? Her name is Grace Krilanovich and this is her debut.

The Orange Eats Creeps reads like an extended tone poem written by someone on an LSD trip who has just woken up from a fever dream. It shares quite a bit of DNA with Acker's surreal Don Quixote - weirdly disjointed, albeit evocative, prose written from constantly shifting perspectives and describing the palpable horrors of a vagabond, junkie teenaged girl roaming the streets of the Pacific Northwest in search of her missing (dead?) step-sister (lover?). The rhythmic, repetitive writing is artfully composed and designed to conjure a very specific mood...

Dreadful, grey and disturbing.

There are [oblique] references to the Donner Party, shock rocker GG Allin (who often punctuated his performances by flinging his own feces into the audience) and the Green River serial killer. Although, truth be told, I might have missed these without having read the overleaf first. Which is partly why I've opted to only give the book three stars. While I appreciate a challenging novel, I'll admit that my mind tended to wander during the longer, more metaphysical, passages and I found that the actual storyline tends to get buried, making the action (such as it is) a bit hard to follow.

Oh, and if your idea of a book about teenage vampires in the Pacific Northwest is the Twilight series, stay away from this one. Frankly, I was rather surprised to learn that this won a Speculative Fiction literary award, since I saw the vampire/fantasy element as being strictly metaphorical. This reminded me more of Lee Williams underappreciated novel, After Nirvana (if Williams had been on acid when he wrote it) or a surrealistic version of the gripping 1984 documentary film about Seattle's teenaged runaways, "Streetwise" or even Harmony Korine's creepy little indie film "Kids."

My verdict? Read if you're looking to be shocked and challenged. Avoid if you're seeking emotional engagement or facile entertainment.½