an introduction to
the orange eats creeps 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, Bronte 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 Excene Cervenka and Henry Rollins, if not necessarily those people). A vampire novel then as Céline would have written, with dashes of Burroughs and Tom Verlaine playing guitar in the background: hallucinatory, passionate and gorgeous, hardcore by all the best definitions of the word. Twilight this isn’t. I’m probably getting too old to speak for the times, so I won’t guess as to how this novel speaks for them. I think it can be called a romantic novel, if you want to, but if so then it’s the romanticism of excess — of experiential derangement and a carnal nihilism that reveals itself as an act of liberation before it’s exposed as an act of courage. A young nomad haunted by visions of her lost sister searches for something she can’t identify, driven by a nearly feral instinct that will know what she’s found only when she’s found it. The woods she infests and the beaches she crosses are filled with wild music, wilder oaths and their subsequent betrayals, the wildest silences and the whispers that finally rupture such silences. The narrator falls into and out of the company of other young subterraneans. I think there’s love in here but that may be sentimentalism on my part. What there certainly is is a pulse, an arterial signal, a viscera of the psyche, and though for some the intensity and boldness may be a shock, for the rest of us the exhilaration of such a novel is nearly beyond calculation. For some time now — thirty years, maybe fifty, maybe for as long as the prospect of nuclear oblivion raised questions about relevancy that the noir of the Forties and the bebop of the Fifties and psychedelia of the Sixties answered just by their being — North American fiction has struggled for a way to matter. Sometimes the struggle has been heroic and sometimes it’s been stillborn, in an afterbirth of defeatism, throttled by the umbilical of obsolescence. Without question, since the Eighties our fiction has become either pronouncedly theoretical or, like so much of the culture, seduced by the kind of branding that com-
municates as shorthand. Except for passing references to danklit convenience stores that no one will mistake for glamorous, The Orange Eats Creeps evokes a limbo that’s narcotic and dreamblasted and could be Anywhere, Anytime except for the anxiety that feels as primordial as it does twenty-first century. No one can say for sure when fiction will take its next evolutionary turn. Perhaps it already has, sometime in the last quarter century, under our noses. Perhaps that turn is to the semiotic — good news for the theoreticians but not so much the rest of us. If, however, the pivot is to something else then let’s hope rather it’s a fiction of open wounds, like this savage rorschach of a book etched in scars of braille. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here, at the eye of this vortex that strands us in a new home. —Steve Erickson April 2010