All good books are praiseworthy, but each bad book is bad in its own special way. Some falter through sheer ineptitude, a lack of talent that shines forth on every page. Others are written by those with genuine skills, but who earn our obloquy by p ouring out hackwork, or sacrificing honesty to advance ideology, or writing novelizations of doltish hit movies. There are still others on my list: scheming plagiarists, academics who pepper their ‘texts’ with obscure continental jargon, or churn out boring tomes in hopes of securing tenure at a respectable Midwestern college, or biographers who wait until their subject is dead so libel laws are no longer enforceable, or journalists who rush books to market on tawdry celebrity scandals, or….
Well, it’s a long list. But the worst offender of all, in my rankings of authorial transgressions, is the pretentious novelist. Ah the horror of these grotesque narratives, pages on life support dangling wounded metaphors, a veritable battlefield hospital of sentences, each trying desperately to hold on to the last vestiges of their ebbing meaning. And they’ve only got their author to blame who, forced to choose, decided it is better to impress, than delight.
The Orange Eats Creeps is just such a book. Indeed, it is an extreme example. In her desire to impress, Grace Krilanovich has tossed so much overboard— plot, character development, even coherence. Sentences not only falter, but go to war with themselves, like some kind of autoimmune reaction in which an organism devours itself.
Let’s take this typical passage from p. 140:
"Bleating horrid calls to the street…passing by towns slowly, descending toward the hot, humid afternoon-hell in that secret place, searching out some semblance of normalcy out of the shallow night, your fractured thoughts occupied by that fateful hour of afternoon. Possessed calls piercing the night, you’re caught in its thrall, head pounding looking for answers. It’s all wrong, you’re all wrong."
This passage comes near the conclusion of the book, yet the reader is still unable, at this point, to identify who is experiencing this scene, or whom the second person 'you'—mentioned three times here—indicates. The most likely candidate is the female narrator, who usually appears in the first person in these pages, but not always. But, in the context of the passage, 'you' might also be the protagonist's sister or 'mother'. Then again, three paragraphs later, a name finally appears ("Oh Seth! What am I doing here without you?")—and the reader must now accept the possibility that the ‘you’ a page earlier was the 'boyfriend' Seth. Yet even if we solve this insoluble mystery, we still don’t know if the impressionistic passages ("Bleating horrid calls to the street…") are happening to this 'you' or are being described to this 'you'. This is not an isolated example, but happens again and again in the text.
But let’s look again at the cited passage, and ask some basic questions. For example, when is this incident of the “bleating, horrid calls” taking place? Well, that seems simple to answer—the author refers to “hot, humid afternoon-hell.” But, wait, she also refers to “the shallow night.” Then she returns to describing the “fateful hour of afternoon.” But then she mentions “calls piercing the night. Give up, my friend, you will never figure out the chronology of any paragraph in this novel, let alone the timeline for the ‘story’ (I use that term loosely) as a whole. And space is just as confusing as time in this novel. Can you visualize this scene? No, you can’t. But it’s certainly not for an absence of adjectives and descriptive passages. The reader faces an avalanche of them; the only problem is that the descriptive passages here fail to describe anything.
I suppose I ought to address the ‘plot’ at this point. But this is even more difficult to unlock than the vague, rambling paragraphs that fill this volume. The narrator, a runaway teen, is a vampire, and has met some other young bloodsuckers. “We’re blood-hungry teenagers; our rage knows no bounds and coagulates the pulse of our victims on contact.” But even this bit of backstory may or may not be true. Even Steve Erikson, who gushes over the book in an intro that reads like a paid infomercial, admits: "I’ve never been sure if the young 'vampires' who roam the northwest netherland in The Orange Eats Creeps are really vampires." In other words, the very foundation of the plot is crumbling.
There are a few other plot elements worth mentioning. The narrator is searching for her sister Kim, and hangs out with vampire boys. They spend a lot of time in convenience stores and parking lots. Eventually an evil warlock shows up, but to what purpose, who can guess? But even these flimsy threads of story soon disappear. Except for a few pages at the beginning, and a few others at the end of the book, most of this novel operates without plot, complication, development or resolution.
Perhaps it aspires to the status of poetry. But even poetry has some meager obligations to refer to…well, to refer to something , no? When Krilanovich says of a character that he "screams and barfs at the same time," I wonder at the physiological impossibility of this maneuver. When she describes a "sky that burned orange as an intestine," I wonder where she did her internship in gastroenterology. When she refers to the "mushroomy aroma of murder," I rise up in protest at the injustice to morels, who have never harmed a soul, unless the ill-informed victim picked up a toadstool by mistake. So let’s blame toadstools, not mushrooms. Yet let’s be honest: the main goal of such passages—and of the book as a whole—is to impress us with the author’s edginess .
And, certainly Krilanovich is edgy. But edges can only exist in relation to a center, and this text has a big hole where that center ought to be. This creates many problems, not the least of which is the difficulty for the reader to care about characters who not only care so little about themselves, but possess so little identity that, during much of the book, we have no idea of who is doing what to whom. For a novel that wants so much to shock and disgust, this is a major liability. You can’t be shocked, if you don’t care, and Krilanovich never gives us a reason to do so.
I didn't learn until I finished this painful read that Grace Krilanovich constructed the plot (such as it is) by picking cards at random from a homemade pack. I can only guess what was on these cards or how they impacted the story (such as it is). But I feel confident in concluding that Krilanovich wasn't playing with a full deck.
Ted Gioia writes about music, literature and popular culture. His latest book is How to Listen to Jazz from Basic Books.
Give up, my friend, you will never figure out the chronology of any paragraph in this novel, let alone the timeline for the story.