ON PEACH: 

Andrew Duncan Worthington’s “The Golf Course” appeared on Peach yesterday. Worthington, author of the novel ​Walls ​(CCM 2014), has a way of letting the banality of everyday events spiral out of control through the calm voice of his prose. “The Golf Course” details a failed uprising centered within a posh country club, and the unfolding events are shocking in their mundanity. Hostages are taken, lives are lost, and the crooked negotiators are baffled by the entire scene: “Crossing into the next room, he saw a few people, presumably terrorists, with masks off sitting around a large conference table eating brunch. Five bottles of hot sauce were on the table. What in the hell could they need all that hot sauce for?” “The Golf Course” grimaces all the way to its conclusion, as blood is combed from the sandtraps, and business-as-usual reigns supreme once again. 

 IN PRINT: 

The Orange Eats Creeps​ 
by Grace Krilanovich (fiction)
Two Dollar Radio, 172 pages

Grace Krilanovich’s ​The Orange Eats Creeps​ centers on a group of teenage “hobo vampire junkies” roaming the Pacific Northwest of the early 90’s, but the reality of that premise is deceptive. The wayward teens of the hallucinatory, Burroughs-esque novel seem to be vampires only in their various hungers, both pharmaceutical and personal. It’s hard to say, as the narrator passes out and wakes again in different times, places, and lives. The veil of a horror novel is a coded language to communicate the deepest sense of the loss of self, as the wayward monsters of ​The Orange Eats Creeps​ fade into the cracks of society: “My shadow is just dirt. I store myself in the muddy smells in the backs of buildings.”

 IN PRINT: 

Napalm Recipe​
by Shane Jesse Christmass (fiction)
Dostoyevsky Wannabe Experimental, 104 pages

The bio on Shane Jesse Christmass’s personal website suggests that “the future of the word, the novel, will be in synthetic telepathy.” ​Napalm Recipe ​strives to push that claim into reality. The book casts the reader as a low-level data processor in the bowels of hell. Information is dispensed in tight bursts, paragraphs that slide across the page are intercut by distorted image-macros. “Writing is only just data collection and the creation of that data. Glory through repetition/recycling,” Christmass writes. ​Napalm Recipe​ attacks the preconceived notions we bring to any book, showing literature to be nothing more than a stack of paper choked with words. The high dose of humor in the accumulation of horror Christmass splashes across each page makes the swift experiment of ​Napalm Recipe ​a disorienting, and exhilarating, modern nightmare.