The Orange Eats Creeps

“I remember reading this novel when it came out in 2010, and gasping audibly at the audacity of its rule-breaking: this was a novel unlike any I had read before, and boy was it fun, and weird, and gross, and punk. I never hear people talking about it these days, but they should be: it’s a careening, side-elbowing nightmare of a book that you should definitely read if you liked Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream.”
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub

“The degree of ‘speculativeness’ in Grace Krilanovich’s beautifully bewildering debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, is a matter of opinion—are Krilanovich’s drug-addled teenagers wandering the Pacific northwest in the nineties really vampires, or is their ‘vampireness’ more a metaphor for a profoundly deranged inner state? … In The Orange Eats Creeps, the quest for answers is a viciously thrilling one.
—Laura van den Berg, Tor.com

“Rimbaud, Huysmans, Kiernan, Brite–they’re all in there, along with a very dark, almost malevolent sense of humor. Luckily, the author doesn’t hamstring the text by trying to pull back, trying to make the narrator seem nice at any point or non-judgmental, or even the text itself… The excitement and originality of this novel are created by the reader’s explorations of it along the way, through the narrator’s unique perspective–her way of seeing (and not seeing) things, and the language, which continues to surprise and challenge long after you’ve finished the book.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy

“Yes, Krilanovich’s debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, is about vampires—but it is about as far from Twilight as one can get. The novel is more of a horror story in free verse, with bloodthirsty teen punks roaming around the Pacific Northwest of the 1990s, drugging and boozing and taking in basement rock shows. The book feels written in a fever; it is breathless, scary and like nothing I’ve ever read before… Krilanovich’s work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins.”
—Rachel Syme, NPR

“This, line by line, worked. Every line from beginning on was placed there by a wise, surprising hand… I know this will be a book I read again and again over the years; it will not be artifice on my shelf, it will be a space.”
—Blake Butler, The Nervous Breakdown

“The most stunning transitions in The Orange Eats Creeps do seem conjured, perhaps supernatural.”
—Gabriel Blackwell, Hobart

“In many ways, [The Orange Eats Creeps] is a novel about the horror of physical experience; about the organic and psychic detritus of an alienated world; about eating the self and shitting it out; about consumption, apocalypse, and fear… It’s a novel that teaches new ways of reading, and points towards a poetic fiction meshing genre, form, image and psyche into a tangled, hallucinatory, beautiful mess.”
—Vicky Osterweil, The New Inquiry

“One of 2010’s small-press triumphs.”
—The Week

“Grace Krilanovich’s first book is a steamy cesspool of language that stews psychoneurosis and viscera into a horrific new organism—the sort of muck in which Burroughs, Bataille, and Kathy Acker loved to writhe.”
—The Believer

“This is the number one book I have purchased for friends and family, have recommended, have quoted, have furiously dog-eared, underlined, and marked up. This is a book with a heart that pulses, and while you’re not going to get a sense of arc or resolution, that’s the point—that’s the horror. Krilanovich leaves you stranded in a ghostly ocean of beautiful, yet alienating, lyrical syntax.”
—Kia Groom, Quaint Magazine

“Rimbaud, Huysmans, Kiernan—they’re all in there, along with a very dark and satisfyingly malevolent sense of humor… The real and the phantasmagorical combine in a chemical reaction.”
—Omnivoracious

“A relentless existential nightmare as baffling as it is brilliant. Krilanovich dispenses with so many writing norms that the reader is required to figure out a new way to read. It’s a thrilling ride.”
—Shelf Unbound Magazine

“In [Krilanovich’s] impressively weird surreal-horror novel The Orange Eats Creeps, ‘vampire hobo junkies’ rampage around Portland and its burbs. Think Twilight on the urban growth boundary—except actually interesting.”
—Portland Monthly Magazine

“One of the more interesting literary experiences in recent times. The Orange Eats Creeps is sure to make an impression.”
—The Cult

“Potent and entirely original.”
—Powell’s Review-a-Day

“The Orange Eats Creeps contains the hallucinatory, disjointed, plotless, yet bizarrely charming ravings of a young refugee from foster care who now belongs to a pack of teenage hobo vampires that rove convenience stores and supermarkets high on Robitussin and mop buckets of coffee. These feral, trashed-out bloodsuckers have nothing to do with the Twilight crowd, devoid as they are of sex appeal or commercial potential.”
—Newsday

“This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. Krilanovich build[s] characters that most other first-time novelists wouldn’t dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language that you wouldn’t expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. [The Orange Eats Creeps is a] nervy novel. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation.”
—The Dominion

“Forget about trite vampire books. In Grace Krilanovich’s bold debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, her undead protagonists are “immoral shithead” junkies, thirsty for blood and cough syrup.”
—Nylon

“Beautiful and deranged. [Krilanovich] nails the shaky worldview of a supernatural teen narco-insomniac… Being undead, here, is the defining paradox of the teenage female experience: to be both immortal and rapidly aging.”
—Adam Wilson, Bookforum

“Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps rewrites both the vampire novel and fiction in general. Come[s] close to performing a lobotomy on the reader. Screams with a post-punk adrenaline, like Nightwood on really bad acid.”
—Ashley Crawford, 21c Magazine

“If Black Hole is a mythology of adolescence in Seattle in the 1970s, then Krilanovich’s book picks up the reins twenty years later, only slightly to the south in central Oregon. By the end, Krilanovich’s narrator has encountered and embraced her own personal form of hell, which in its horror also contains a great beauty.”
—Anne K. Yoder, The Millions

“[The Orange Eats Creeps is] raw and seething. It snatches up the reader and doesn’t let go until the surprising twist at the end, which is perhaps the most frightening part of the book. The result is a creepy uneasiness and an impulse to look over your shoulder.”
—Samantha Ecker Angerame, The Brooklyn Rail

“Excellent. It is a slippery novel. It will never lay still and compromising in your hands. Language charges this book. It provides regular reward from one sentence to the next.”
—Darby M. Dixon III, The Collagist

“A hallucinatory deluge, a place where the present and the past are in constant flux, where the mundane and the fantastic bleed into one another. Like Brian Evenson, Krilanovich borrows certain tropes from horror fiction, but the terror she’s after is a much more elemental one: the loss of self, the question of identity, and the demolition of what could be considered real.”
—Flavorwire

“The stream-of-consciousness writing is to die for: I love the way Krilanovich employs crass, quotidian words (slutty, shitty) in a way that makes her sentences feel fresh. I love the nightmarish quality created by the narrator’s alternating between descriptions of memories and observations of the present. And I love the whole crusty culture, forever and always.”
—Anna McConnell, Rookie

“[Krilanovich’s] novel shares a disorienting quality with Brian Evenson’s The Open Curtain. And in the end, the most resonant pit-of-your-stomach dread doesn’t come from a roadside killer or fangs poised above a neck. Instead, its a much simpler scene, something rooted in mundane indifference that brings this novel to its unexpectedly domestic and achingly painful conclusion.”
—Tobias Carroll, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“Amazing. Truly lives up to its hype: it’s enormous and insane and magic.”
—Blake Butler, HTML Giant

“The year’s most horrifying novel. This postmodern gem is both intense and surreal, and one of the most spectacular debuts I have read in a long time.”
—Largehearted Boy

“A posse of ravenous teenagers rampages through Krilanovich’s slyly arch debut, devouring and destroying everything unfortunate enough to be in its path… Krilanovich’s postmodern mashup is refreshlingly piquant and playful, reminiscent of postmodern Euro fiction and full of poison pill observations.”
—Publishers Weekly

“It’s a riot grrrl novel, a psychobilly novel, a crustgoth novel. It’s a fragmented, ugly, revolting mess and I loved it… The Orange Eats Creeps is a survey of consciousness in crisis—the crisis of late capitalism, with vampires making their way through a gig economy, addicted, transient, desperate, enthralled to a particularly Western weirdness.”
—Edwin Turner, Biblioklept

“It is completely visceral and utterly unsettling. Over and over the reader’s orientation is subverted by the affected use of metaphor, the prime example being vampires… To say it is unlike anything else I have ever read would be false. There are traces of William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and even Walt Whitman. Although it can be figured as a young-adult book, it is dangerous enough to be held by any age. It reminds us how violent a word can be. If you’ve ever been called alt, hipster, anarchist, punk, or any other sub-culture this book is for you.”
—Brian Folan, Square Pop

“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. If a new literature is at hand then it might as well begin here.”
—Steve Erickson, author of Zeroville, These Dreams of You, Shadowbahn, and more

“Like something you read on the underside of a freeway overpass in a fever dream. The Orange Eats Creeps is visionary, pervy, unhinged. It will mess you up.”
—Shelley Jackson, author of Patchwork Girl and Half Life

“Wandering back and forth between the waste spaces of the Northwest and the dark recesses of its narrator’s mind, The Orange Eat Creeps reads like the foster child of Charles Burns’ Black Hole and William Burroughs’ Soft Machine. A deeply strange and deeply successful debut.”
—Brian Evenson, author of The Open Curtain, A Collapse of Horses, and more

“I’m not the first writer to reference Bigelow’s Near Dark and Grace Krilanovich’s debut novel The Orange Eats Creeps in the same grave-corrupted breath… Just like Near Dark, The Orange Eats Creeps revels in the flickering menace of quintessentially American roadside spaces after the circuits have gone on the fritz and normal folk are safe in bed.”
—Adrian Van Young, Electric Literature

“Wrapped up in this festering novel is a coming of age story about a former foster child that gets entangled in the Hobo Vampire lifestyle. What remains unsettling about Orange is that readers cannot know if the characters are real vampires—or teenagers who have smoked too much meth. Dark, disturbing, and angry, Krilanovich will pull you into a world you want no part of, but you will not be able to put the book down.”
—Devon Roberts, Grand Central Magazine