Acid Green Velvet

“Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps, from 2010, was an underground hit about vampire punks roaming around the Pacific Northwest. Sixteen years later, Acid Green Velvet is just as formidable. In a California town called Anzar in the late-19th century, Paulette is living with a local magnate’s eccentric son who’s fascinated by the tramps gathering outside his manor. The real sell here is Krilanovich’s prose, a spiky, louche delight.”
—Emma Alpern, Vulture

“[A] singular literary voice… Written with grimy, enlivening frankness — and an ability to dig into moral ambiguity — every character scrambles to get a leg up. This is a tale that helps us get in touch with, as Krilanovich writes: ‘the pain of personhood.’”
—Heather Scott Partington, Los Angeles Times

“A mesmerizing story of class war and youthful rebellion in Gilded Age California. Krilanovich’s tall tale takes on immense proportions, but the main event is the arresting prose. It’s dynamite.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“[Grace Krilanovich is] the very best of her generation of authors, and not for nothing. A book packed with so much, both thematically and textually, that’s this good is a testament to the brilliance of its author. The pairing of prose style with content makes it all leap off the page, hellishness surrounding the reader like a hood. Acid Green Velvet is a strikingly beautiful nightmare of trust and fear in a world primed for explosion into a war on many fronts.”
—Luke Alchin-Scolnick, L’Esprit Literary Review

“Meticulously realized and yet brazenly fresh, Acid Green Velvet is a marvel of character and situation. Krilanovich writes unlike any other writer.”
—Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy

“I can’t get over how good this book is. Mix one shot Steinbeck with three each of Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and Voltairine de Cleyre, shake, strain through a hobo’s sock, douse with glowing green absinthe, and light the whole thing on fire—it still won’t be as intoxicatingly funny, smart, sexy, and marvelously weird as Acid Green Velvet. Grace Krilanovich writes with ferocity, bottomless courage, and unfailing soul.”
—Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks

“As revealed yet again in her riveting new novel Acid Green Velvet, Grace Krilanovich is singular, mistress of a pitiless psychedelic noir lurking in our american woods just beyond the back window.”
—Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn

“Just as she did with her ‘slutty teenage hobo vampire junkie’ novel The Orange Eats Creeps, Grace Krilanovich’s Acid Green Velvet takes an established genre—in this case the Gothic Western—and blows it into a thousand startlingly unrecognizable pieces. Antecedents here might be Charles Portis, or the sublimely ecstatic terrors of John Hawkes, or even Cormac McCarthy, if McCarthy were low-key way funnier and shorn of his more grandiloquent tendencies, but Krilanovich is that rare thing: a writer so thrillingly, delightfully original, that even such elite comparisons do her a disservice. Acid Green Velvet is amazing.”
—Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

“With lavishly tactile prose, the amazing Krilanovich returns with a sweeping and vibrant novel that is part thriller, part Western, part philosophy, part poem, all of it further showcasing her vast intelligence and capacity to immerse us in a world and time.”
—Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade

“Impressive… The story becomes as much a tinderbox as the city of Anzar it imagines into being, at once completely California and otherworldly. One strange simmering spectacle.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“I was a huge fan of Grace Krilanovich’s bizarro vampire novel The Orange Eats Creeps when it was published in 2010. I kind of can’t believe it’s been over 15 years since then (vampires indeed), but she is finally back with a second novel. I know absolutely nothing about it, but I am lying ravenously in wait.”
—Emily Temple, LitHub

“Welcome to the low-key literary event of the year, at least for weird book lovers and any card-carrying members of the Grace Krilanovich cult (who have been hoping for a follow-up to The Orange Who Eats Creeps since 2010). Acid Green Velvet is an astonishing, exhilarating experience from its first page to its last – a vivid, unusual, and relentless fantasia that feels eerily transported from some other time or place. A tangled, overgrown hedge of a narrative that holds space for both hard-worn, grimy worldbuilding and whiffs of the vaguely mystical in equal measure. The kind of book where it only takes 20 pages to think, ‘yeah, this might go down as a classic.’ I absolutely loved it.”
—Bryan Seitz, Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor MI)

“Acid Green Velvet disoriented me and intoxicated me in a way I should have been expecting given the title, but somehow wasn’t; nothing I have ever read before prepared me for this book. A blend of sex, history, alternative lifestyles, cultural and economic critique, and experimental writing which could only have come out of the Two Dollar Radio stable. If forced to summarise the atmosphere of the book, I would say something along the lines of Pynchon meets Kesey, but Krilanovich is very much her own thing – just read it.”
—Doron Klemer, Octavia Books (New Orleans, LA)

“This 19th century California town is like a hymn of misanthropy luring and ensnaring all its scorned characters. Krilanovich perceives how dehumanization psychologically, animalistically, and metaphysically transforms a person, balancing the soapbox with the ideal amount of schadenfreude. While things aren’t always as they seem, this phantasmagoric folkish thriller couldn’t be more lucid. Anarcho-vampire women’s collectives hold dominion, fringe outcasts actually punch up, and the predaceous nature of religion is a looming entity as substantial as the werewolf cameos. It’s got this historical western counterculture core ethos worthy of an underground cult classic.”
—Danielle Smith, Auntie’s Bookstore (Spokane WA)