Editor’s Note: All review content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
It is difficult to live in the American West without being haunted by the mythology of its transformation. Just generations ago, the land evolved so rapidly you’d be forgiven for thinking of it as a birth — or a death, depending on who you ask.
The sense of adventure and excitement that characterizes western stories relies on the possibility afforded by a landscape in transition. The West is a fruitful setting for literature and a tired one. For every “O Pioneers!” and “Blood Meridian,” there are stacks of trite mass-market paperbacks collecting dust in attics.
These days, the West is the last place one might look to find groundbreaking storytelling, but it’s exactly where they would find “Acid Green Velvet” by Grace Krilanovich, published Sept. 8 by Two Dollar Radio. Remarkably, Krilanovich has breathed new life into a tired genre and plunged into the depths of the western canon to tell a story as singular as it is hauntingly universal.
The bulk of Krilanovich’s sophomore novel, and her first in over 15 years, is set in the late 1870s in the coastal California town of Anzar. To some, Anzar is the site of a utopian revolution, and to others, it’s a place of a criminal infiltration — an ostensibly political struggle between the tramps and the town’s elite. The struggle is produced by the characteristic tension of infant western towns: The attempt to delineate boundaries and impose control upon a place that owes its existence to the promise of freedom.
This struggle is the breeding ground for much of the spectacle that makes “Acid Green Velvet” so intoxicating. Anzar’s park becomes a tramp settlement: a shifting, sleepless fever dream. Utopian communities form in the woods as quickly as they dismantle. Rumors spread of strange contraptions built in hotel basements. In the eclectic world of Anzar, visionaries walk among grifters and opportunists, and the line between them is blurred.
Anzar is bizarre and rife with paradox. Its strangeness bleeds into the language used to describe it. Often, sentences employ a level of intentionality rivaling that of poetry. Every image seems laden with meaning. The reader is compelled to see signs everywhere, like the vagrant mystics decoding hidden messages in snake skins. How could one read the rich descriptions of Halsey Manor, where the protagonist Paulette lives with her soon-to-be husband, Johnny Halsey, without seeing something in the maze of furniture, the half-eaten meals and the painting of a slaughtered horse?
Krilanovich uses the building as the primary site of the novel’s conflict. One character, a vagrant and self-fashioned spiritual leader, asks Halsey, “Do you know how seeds of power are sown in a home? … Are you aware how it takes root in a given room and grows there?” Others peer through windows under the cover of night or don layered disguises. In Anzar, trespassing is a form of violence. So is seeing someone’s face. In this way, the body becomes grounds for conflict as well.
Anzar’s class of transient poor have expressly political aims, but it quickly becomes clear the real struggle is for a more fundamental, futile form of liberation: freedom from time and corporeality. But even as the residents and drifters of Anzar try to sever themselves from these things, they cling to them. Characters sport tattoos of wings and burrow into the earth, reject their familial legacies in one breath, and then invoke them to exert influence in the next.
Readers may not relate to the specificities of life in 1870s California, but the universal complications and limitations of life and corporality “Acid Green Velvet” explores forge a powerful connection across time. Characters maintain their compelling, historically specific idiosyncrasies while lamenting life’s tireless cycles, craving the gaze of others even as they shy from it. And in the era of microplastics, where contamination constantly threatens our notions of impermeability, Paulette’s horror as she watches water seep through the cracks of the Halsey manor is a potent image.
Krilanovich is not a fool. She doesn’t attempt to offer solutions to the human condition, however painful it may be. She instead focuses her gaze on the boundaries of the self that vex and delight us and traverses with ease the world where things bleed into other things and nothing is fully intact. Such an intimate peering into our most fundamental struggles is bound to unnerve, and Krilanovich knows this, as the violence of being seen is one of the novel’s central themes. It’s a rare and profound thing to have our sutures pried open so precisely, making “Acid Green Velvet” well worth the read.
4.5/5
Reach Chloe Bjork at entertainment@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.
