For My Lovely Spouse
This week we celebrated my lovely spouse’s birthday. She loves Halloween, so it’s always a spooky good time and this year we rolled in some of our fall activities like apple picking and a ghost tour at one of the local theatres. All of my spooky posts are for her, who loves the fantastic and always revels in a good yarn that features ghosts and goblins and the supernatural. She’s the one that taught me that the world is full of wonders, even on the worst days.
Monsters with a Twist
I’d heard a lot about Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps before I happened across it out in the wild. I was not disappointed in the reading. In fact, I have her new book Acid Green Velvet eagerly waiting in my to-read stacks. The Orange Eats Creeps is that magnificent kind of spooky book that takes an archetypal story and monster and turns it on its head to make something new and even scarier — a comment on the modern world and our place in it. The Orange Eats Creeps follows a young woman as she wanders across the United States looking for her sister, but actually looking for a life that doesn’t involve abuse and degradation. She falls in with groups of fellow vagabonds that may or may not be fellow vampires and encounters monsters that are all too common.
Anti-Romantic
If you pick up this book looking for the usual romantic vampire story of misted moors and gentlemanly killers in lush capes, you sure have come to the wrong place. There is no romance here, and, arguably, there may not even be any literal vampires. Instead there is the razor-sharp grit of a young woman sleeping in garbage, dragging herself across barren landscapes full of dereliction, death, and violence. It’s a harrowing and feminist tale of what women suffer at the hands of those who are supposed to protect them and the systems who continually let them down.
The Disturbing Sublime
The descriptions here are lavishly lush in their utter grossness. So much so that when I was reading it I got the feeling that I was taught about in art class when we examined Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings — that being the sublime. It’s usually defined as a sweeping majesty that inspires a kind of horror as you are left feeling your own insignificance against the vast beauty of nature. I would say that Krilanovich accomplishes this when it comes to the ugly barren reality of the urban landscape and the descriptions of the blood, vomit, sweat, tears, and fluids that go along with a life lived on the streets and outside of society. It’s horrible, but beautiful. Grotesque and vast enough to reduce one life to one piece of flotsam in the endless rivers of human suffering.
The way Krilanovich brings this to life is so disturbing and yet so beautiful.
Happy Halloween!
An excellent and spooktastic Halloween to you all! May you eat far too much candy and drown yourself in all manner of spooky delights. I’m planning on a movie marathon provided by TCM along with some popcorn and chocolate.
Then it’s November, with plans on the blog for a bit of Friendsgiving feature. I’m too late for my own Thanksgiving, but, hey, holiday gatherings are looming on the horizon so it’s all still achingly relevant.
