Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Monday, June 13, 2011

I Know What You Are: You're a Nowhere Kid



What is the mindscape of a Nowhere Kid. You know what a Nowhere Kid is? It's the lost ones, sexually abused, disassociated, drugged-out, dropped-out, gone. I borrow the term from Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, a film that has a group of violent, dangerous, anarchist kids living in junk cars and big spare tires out in the desert, stealing bags of beans from people that don't have much. All of them runaways, abuse victims, waste-outs, gone.

Gone. That's the story of Orange. She's gone. She's runaway. She's disassociated. She's running through the dark with creeps and charismatic drug-addict vampires. Are they vampires, or are they just looking for the only explanation for what they are? ESP is what you feel when you separate and cast your long, hard gaze inward into your own sense of disassociation. The mind reaches out demanding a connection to the world. Finding none, it invents connections. Drugs don't help much.

What is the mindscape of the broken and the damned in the shadow of the consumerist dream, feeding off the scraps of society at twenty-four hour convenience stores and truck stops and drinking blood and drifting in and out of the flow of life with ESP and searching for a sister and drinking blood and using each other's bodies and drinking blood and the vampires are out there, in the nowhere places, slipping in and out of the edge of society, predators after prey, prey running from predators.

did I even read this book? is this the kind of book that can be read, or is it something inhaled like methamphetamines? Words of darkness and the end of the world straight mainline to the brainpan.

There's a rock show going down right now in an abandoned building.

Scrounged is better than bought. Sponging is better than working. DIY perverts cut adrift, foster care kids propping up the misery of the trucking industry with sex and death.

Orange is looking for her sister, Kim. Orange is out there looking through the wires and dangerous, deadly, messed-up stuff that is out among the nowhere kids, living with them, being with them.

Look out, Orange. Look out, Kim. Look out, kids.

Eat this book. Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich from Two Dollar Radio, 2011.



1 comment:

tim said...

I think I love this book. Need to read it again. And again. I was just starting to get into the flow of it in the last 40 pages. I started reading it out loud, sort of mumbling it to myself, like one of Tom Wait's story/songs.
I love the reviews of this book. They all get...kinda bendy...and force the artistic side of criticism. Brilliant.