Starting a new post series here, thoughts on books I am reading as I venture back into the world of literature now that I have ADHD meds. I’m not calling them book reviews because the word reviews makes it sound serious and intentional in my opinion, when I am literally just rambling bullshit. This week's book Thoughts are for Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creep, Porpentine Charity Heartscape's Low Kill Shelter, and Chana Porter's The Seep.
The Orange Eats Creeps was one of the first books I picked up when I was first prescribed my stimulants. I can't really remember who recommended it to me but I know I didn't find it on my own, and if I hadn't been told about it, I probably never would've stumbled across it. I am so, so deeply glad I did, though.
This is going to sound a little mean, but I promise I mean it sincerely - TOEC is the book that made me realize there really is someone out there for everyone (everyone being every book, that is.) Like, this book consistently gets negative or confused reviews on Storygraph, but I connected with it instantly. Its plot is incredibly nebulous in every sense that the word 'nebulous' provokes--it is dark, vague, and vast; it is celestial and chill and void; is scattered and vibrant with both pulsating, beautiful light and a burning darkness, like the stars were before pollution clouded them all away. Reading this novel feels like - you know how on Lexx, if you committed a crime, you were put in a machine that harvested all of your organs at once for the "protein bank" and fed them to a giant destruction machine? Or how on Babylon 5, the Narn were vivisected as "punishment"? Or the Invader Zim episode where Zim just kept stuffing organs into himself to make him appear more human? It feels like that to read.
It really does feel like each word is being poured, molten and golden and bubbling, down the space between all of my organs, into the cycle of their systems, decimating flesh to just a black char. (There is a sequence near the end of the book, beginning around the Warlock's seduction of the narrator if I remember correctly, where Krilanovich describes things as black over and over again—black tar firebreath—and so many things are black black black—black crickets, black eyes, a black horse, blackbirds, black raindrops, black bones, black smoke—and this repetition is drilled in and in and in. It's so interesting, and so visceral!)
This book feels like finding a tooth in the fast food you ordered. Disgusting and horrifying in a way that makes you beg for context like it is water in a galactic drought. How did this make its way out of Krilanovich's mouth? I feel like she is here, gnawing on me. This book isn't a good time. It feels like a drugged haze. It feels like waking up naked at night behind the dumpster at Safeway with no memory of how you got there. Five fucking stars.
This book made me realize that no matter how batshit a book is—how experimental your style is, how unlikeable your characters are, how incomprehensibly you may write because of neurodivergency—there will always be someone out there who is touched by your work. There is always SOMEONE who will vibe with it, you just need to find them. I am that person for TOEC, and I do not think, thankfully, that I am alone in it.
I'm looking forward to Krilanovich's next book, out in a few days, called Acid Green Velvet. I'm not usualllyyy into Westerns, but I'm interested in seeing what she does with it, because TOEC was her debut in 2010 and she has not published anything since.
Low Kill Shelter was INSANE. I found out about Porpentine's work recently and am reading Serious Weakness at the moment, but when I realized LKS was shorter, I decided to start it when I couldn't sleep at 3AM. I zoomed through it in one sitting! It's so fascinating—my favorite theme is "I'll love you even if you get worse", and this embodies it to the literal. Iran cares for Jess even after he transforms (the book is about a new form of hyperultramegarabies), still cares for him, even loves him enough to satiate him sexually in his rabid form.
He doesn't seem to see Jess as not-Jess, just an altered form of Jess, and I find that this is the way I prefer to be seen as someone with a dissociative disorder—like the dissociated me isn't an entirely different being, floating outside the definition of me (whatever that is), enveloping and infecting and invading, but rather just me being affected by a particular circumstance. The me under stress = a me that is younger = still me, still one brain, still a whole self even when parts are cut out and laid back in without the stitching to keep them in place. Jess without this unnamed disease = the Jess with the unnamed disease = a Jess that is still Jess, just hungier and angrier. The others in LKS? Besides Iran? They shoot and kill the infected. Iran keeps Jess alive and tries to cure him. It reminds me of the way people would rather let the disabled die than work towards a better society for all, because it would be slightly inconvenient while adjusting.
Iran is so calm. He takes the maltreatment he receives from society. Which is why I really really loved the end, when (SPOILERS!) Jess infects him and the canineness of it all kicks in. It is so cathartic to see an autistic character release himself from what society expects him to be--complacent in his position—and kill the ones who taunt them like an animal. Porpentine's prose skills combined with Porpentine's unique grasp on literary humor makes this just an absolutely killer (ha, okay bad joke) read and I have to rip this book apart again later, I think. It's so….
Behind the goring is a half-eaten heart that still hammers on--half in the hand, the other part pulsing deep in the stomach; it is a feelbadgood novel. Even the most grotesque moments of this book still carry an undercurrent of deep devotion that I simply adore. Some parts of this book were predictable, and it is a pandemic story and very clearly so, but I find it subverts the common themes in post-COVID pandemic stories and even the predictability feels good in a way, because I just wanted Iran to snap on Nelson the whole damn time. I love this novella.
And finally:
Unfortunately, I have been thinking non fucking stop about The Seep.
Okay, its potential took over my brain.
See, The Seep is about a near future where Earth has been invaded by these tiny aliens called The Seep, who have made life on Earth into a utopia. Bigotry and capitalism are gone because we have the ability to feel one another’s pain and everything can be provided by Seep. (Except the Seep can still evict you from your house and give it to someone else if you don’t take care of it enough. But you can always go live somewhere else!) People can change forms at will, can live forever, and can turn into babies. One of the supporting characters is a sapient bear. It is similar to Apple TV’s “Pluribus”, which is why I picked it up, but honestly, the worldbuilding here is the best part of the book, and the worldbuilding itself isn’t even explored as much as it could have been. Pluribus simply just did it better.
I loved Trina. Trina, whose wife asks her to become her mother when she turns into a baby, who just can’t do it. Trina, who becomes an alcoholic after her wife turns into a baby, who grieves and grieves and grieves, for years and years. Trina, who fought to be herself and transition and now lives in a world where gender can be changed by the wave of a wand. Which is a good thing, but must feel odd when you faced such a struggle! Trina is an amazing main character to me in terms of personality, but in Porter’s portrayal of her, there are a few things that didn’t feel great.
First off, she is Native American, but in a way where it’s like. Okay. She’s Dubiously Vaguely Nonspecifically Native American. That’s all we know. We don’t learn any specifics about that. Exploring the Native American experience on an Earth that has been invaded and assimilated into One Universal Culture is something that would have been immensely appropriate for the story and something I honestly expected to be explored when I learned about this part of Trina, but literally any detail at all about this part of her is missing. Her race is mentioned in passing twice and that’s it. It seems like a massive oversight considering the nature of the story to not include this at all. It almost feels like Porter was afraid of touching on the subject. When I finished this, I looked up The Seep and it was something that readers who are of color unlike me have also discussed in the past. Additionally, A Storygraph user writes:
…Her being native has no impact on the story other than the author
occasionally using her full name to remind us “hey, remember that Trina is
native!” We never even find out her tribe. The premise of this book, in
contrast, in the hands of a native author might have resulted in
explorations of how something like the land back movement interacts with
the Seep’s need to make everyone happy. How does the Seep prioritize who
gets to be happy: a native person whose life would be better off with
their ancestral land or someone who isn’t native but is happiest living
where they grew up? That’s an interesting question, which I would’ve found
way more compelling than whatever actually Trina does.
It just feels bad.
I also felt as if Trina’s addiction was not handled as well as it could have been. I have many addicts in my family, and have been one. An addict’s relationship with their addiction is complex, highly nuanced. Trina’s addiction feels surface-level—-she likes to drink, she begs YD for a drink who gives in, she drinks too much… for a novel that is primarily about grief, though, I expected it to be explored in more depth than just “drinks too much because she’s sad”. That is absolutely part of addiction…. but it’s not all. Trina was portrayed as very addicted to alcohol, but I don’t know. It felt secondary, when her story is about the impact of grief and pain and loss. It felt like a stereotypical inclusion. Of course she’s sad, she drinks.
Where’s the guilt over doing things that harm others just to get to your substance? In my worst days I was spending my entire monthly income on extremely high dose energy drinks and getting in verbal fights with anyone who told me to stop and it didn’t matter who I hurt or what I said as long as I got what I needed. I was mixing thousands of miligrams of caffeine with 30 miligrams of adderall and hundreds of miligrams of marijuana, adding 1mg of Ativan in sometimes just for fun. I was killing my body and I was having physical effects nearly every day. I don’t think there is only one valid experience of addiction, to be clear—I’m saying what we see in the book doesn’t treat Trina’s addiction with the depth it would realistically have in her situation.
And then there’s fucking Horizon Line. I have not yet encountered a media character that annoys me more than fucking Horizon Line, and how his acts are portrayed. Trina calls him out because he uses his dead Black lover’s appearance as his own appearance come The Seep, taking on the face and body of a dead Black kid when he is a white guy and becoming famous under that image. It’s obviously reprehensible. When we see Horizon Line later, he is taking a boy Trina saw, a boy from a place called the Compound—a place free of Seep life that he had been exiled from—-and Trina decides to follow him to get the boy away from Seep corruption or whatever. She follows Horizon Line to get to the boy, kills Horizon Line, and is taken into a dream sequence thingy where he appears as his true self - an old white dude - and says “You were right, I was racist, I’m sorry” and then dies. Like ??????????? There’s nothing about him realizing his actions were wrong, no insight on why or how he got to that point or what experiences he had that made him reconsider. He is just racist at one point, disappears, and then reappears suddenly racism-cured. And then Trina moves back into her house—the one The Seep wanted to kick her out of (and that fact is never mentioned again, so I guess she just considers it totally acceptable by the end)—AND LEAVES THE BOY with the Seep-obsessed folks—-and submits to a world that evicts people for depression. That tries to erase people’s memories without their consent to keep them happy. And the book ends there.
It needed to be longer, I think. We needed to learn more about The Compound and why the kid got exiled. This kid who is literally like an accessory to Trina, who could be replaced by a Poodle with little or no change to the story. We needed Deeba—Trina’s wife who is the catalyst of the story—-to be more than just Trina’s Dead Wife. To have characterization. We needed to learn more about Trina after her journey and how she readjusts to the world after she finally starts trying to heal from Deeba’s death. More about how she feels about The Seep at the end. We needed to learn more. It needed more!!! And we just didn’t get it.
Anyway, Trina x The Seep smut when, I guess? ‘Cause that’s pretty much all that I’m going to remember, which I feel really bad about saying…
3.25 stars.
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