Luke Alchin-Scolnick
Book Review
A review of Grace Krilanovich’s Acid Green Velvet (Penguin Random House). Purchase the collection directly from the publisher here.
California’s literary folklore is carried mostly in sleazebaggery. Criminals and hardened detectives, drunken romps through Los Angeles, groupies (and more) of the 60s and 70s, conflict between the haves and have-nots. A literary history of oddballs, creeps, underworlds, lively cities. Places crawling with character and romance and evils and everything else that make people on the page feel so vibrant, so tangible. Rarely do stories like these use a rich, haunting prose to give the reader the same nightmares the covers hold. Even rarer is a region’s literary canon given a new entry to stand as something truly unique, in a class of its own in style and textuality. Grace Krilanovich brings all of this with her to the world of Acid Green Velvet and more; so, so much more.
The first three pages set the tone for the rest of the book, each a hypnotic little paragraph functioning as a set of semi-instructions for its reader, microcosms of what to expect as the characters and story grow and begin to fall into each other, describing the spectacles of fear yet to be experienced. The three focal points of the story are described in their infancy with the first sentence of each one:
The spectacle of the skinny boy kicking an injured old man down the beach, the girl in a paisley dress strolling behind, a fence post slung over her shoulder.
The spectacle of the recluse sitting in his house, a shanty palace built on a hilltop once covered by an ancient ocean, its cellar dug from hard-packed earth and the long buried footprints of children and extinct deer.
The spectacle of a tramp entering the city, bedraggled, cracked open and in the process of becoming something new.
These stage-setters offer the first chance to get acclimated to the lavish haunt and decadently sick feeling that runs through the rest of the novel. It’s a strong gravitational pull that doesn’t end until the story does.
Krilanovich’s writing style has put itself on display once before this, fifteen years ago, with her debut novel The Orange Eats Creeps. She’s been praised by any and everyone who has read either of her novels as the very best of her generation of authors, and not for nothing. All through Acid Green Velvet she employs a prose that enraptures, thick with descriptors. She can’t help but stir up a sick, woozy feeling in the stomach of the book–and yours. The world of Anzar is crumbling in the story and around its reader, letting all who turn the page feel the uneasiness in the setting purely through the description, let alone the events themselves. It’s a linguistic surface primed for combustion, just on the edge of disaster, dressed in plush velour the color of acid.
The book is a nightmare of its own volition, spinning a tightly wound web of looming danger, angst, lust, and fear on each page. Characters are experiencing their own string of nightmares and are more than happy to bring the reader along for the ride. There is a palpable nervousness and tension between our primary characters–Paulette, Kenny, Johnny, and Rodney–as they all have reason to hate each other, and yet all need each other to one extent or another. A sadistic voyeurism begins to wash over the four of them as they see the effects their actions all have on their counterparts, and the reader can’t help but join them. Calling it a love rectangle is far too simplistic for the complexity of these relationships. Krilanovich offers her reader a brilliant character study in people that may not be likeable, but are understandable. Her Anzarans force us to stare at all the worst parts of ourselves, the ones we feel guilty for feeling at all, and understand where they’re all coming from. With their heads on a swivel at all times, the four of them have no time for morals.
The structure of much of the story is a series of cat and mouse chases, both big and small. There are escapes from dangerous fathers and scorned lovers, escapes from pressures and anxieties, escapes from class war, escapes from persecution, and escapes from the self. While each person we meet attempts to make their escape, it all feels so inescapable, so far away as to all feel futile, nihilistic. Hope means little more to those who populate Acid Green Velvet than a thin telos for continuing to live. Even in their dreams, these characters find each other and continue the torturous mind games. They’re mostly rats in a cage boxed in by their past and tormented by the specter of their future. In Anzar, there’s nowhere to go, no room to grow.
The heartbeat of the book asks the same thing of its major players and its readers alike: How far–sometimes literally–is too far to go for your own perceived salvation, if you’re not even sure you’ll get it? What are we ever really running from, and why? Betrayal of the self? Ignorance of others? Even the nameless side characters find themselves grappling with these themes en masse. Krilanovich meets our current moment of overwhelming nihilism with a portrait of it dressed in loud clothing. The California of now is not too dissimilar to the California of Acid Green Velvet, save for the more fantastical elements. She reaches deep into her toolbox to create a world overflowing with possibility in all the wrong ways: vampires, violent dogs, haunted houses, nightmares both literal and metaphorical, and on and on. Krilanovich’s maximalism and fear look good together.
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. No aspect of the book is shortchanged in favor of another, no idea left unfleshed. Each character’s individual stories are intertwined into a messy web of hate, love, and fear. Anzar is a puppet-master more than it is a setting, and the language that drags us along is a character in and of itself. Acid Green Velvet is a strikingly beautiful nightmare of trust and fear in a world primed for explosion into a war on many fronts. Always one misstep from disaster and one lucky break from it, too. Bleak stories are more fun, anyway.
Acid Green Velvet
Grace Krilanovich
Penguin Random House
336pp
$19.95
Luke Alchin-Scolnick is a writer and communications professional from Los Angeles, CA. He tends to favor cultural analyses, media criticism, book and film review, and short fiction. His work has appeared in L’Esprit Literary Review, TRUE Magazine, his Substack page The Backshift, and other places. He serves as the the Social Media Manager for Indirect Books.
L'Esprit Literary Review 