Monday, March 28, 2011

The Orange Eats Creeps

The Orange eats Creeps is pretty impressive debut. A dream vision of 90’s Pacific Northwest filled with wild, possibly vampiric, teen delinquents, strange and visionary homeless and runaways, serial killers, and stranger figures that echoes with the fervent music of basement hardcore, stoner metal and riot girl. Despite its declaration of itself as novel this is more of a prose poem, though I guess you can’t market those anymore. This is too bad since along with the novella it is one of my favorite forms, combining narrative urgency of prose with the attention to language of poetry. Steve Erickson’s intro traces Krilanovich’s influences, which are fin-de siecle decadence, Burroughs and the outer regions of beat poetry, punk poetry, the darker regions of French Literature(Huysmans, Baudelaire, and Celine), but he never mentions the book this most resembles, Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. This book could be considered a strong successor to that triumph of beautiful and evil language. The key to this is language and Krilanovich mostly keeps it strong, relentless, profane and hilarious, and filled with freaky imagery for the most part though I thought the last 30 pages lost a little of this energy. I’m excited for what’s next from this author.

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