The Orange Eats Creeps

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THIS IS A VORTEX OF A NOVEL. It’s a novel that takes leave of not its senses but rather of sense, and it demands the reader do the same. This novel is an onslaught, a bombardment before which attempts at refinement must be doomed. Calling a novel “dangerous” is a cliché but this one actually may be; in the years since I’ve become aware of it, when Grace Krilanovich first began composing it in blurts that caught people’s attention including mine, there are those who have tried to discourage its authorship. But it’s a book that seethes with defiance, written by the only sort of novelist worth reading: one committed to a vision that abides no agenda. Here is a book that insists on its glorious disarray, that finds in disorder a ravishing path to truth.

I’ve never been sure if the young “vampires” who roam the northwest netherland in The Orange Eats Creeps are really vampires, and long ago I realized it doesn’t matter. Now of course there is a cultural vogue for vampires that can only exhaust itself sooner rather than later, and when it does, Krilanovich’s novel will be the one left standing, transcending trends it predated. Suffice to say The Orange Eats Creeps is not in the tradition of any contemporary writer popular or otherwise; it can’t even be read as an answer to anything. It’s too singular for that. To the extent that it has a tradition or cares about one, it’s the tradition that began with Blake and has continued through Coleridge, Brontë and Baudelaire, Barbey and Huysmans, the expatriated anarchists of the thirties and the untethered Beats of the fifties, the punk poets of the seventies and early eighties (Iggy and Patti, Richard Hell and Exene Cervenka and Henry Rollins, if not necessarily those people).

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