“Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps, from 2010, was an underground hit about vampire punks roaming around the Pacific Northwest. Sixteen years later, Acid Green Velvet is just as formidable. In a California town called Anzar in the late-19th century, Paulette is living with a local magnate's eccentric son who's fascinated by the tramps gathering outside his manor. The real sell here is Krilanovich's prose, a spiky, louche delight.”
– Emma Alpern, Vulture
“[A] singular literary voice... Written with grimy, enlivening frankness — and an ability to dig into moral ambiguity — every character scrambles to get a leg up. This is a tale that helps us get in touch with, as Krilanovich writes: 'the pain of personhood.'”
– Heather Scott Partington, Los Angeles Times
“A mesmerizing story of class war and youthful rebellion in Gilded Age California. Krilanovich’s tall tale takes on immense proportions, but the main event is the arresting prose. It’s dynamite.”
– Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
“[Grace Krilanovich is] the very best of her generation of authors, and not for nothing. 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. Acid Green Velvet is a strikingly beautiful nightmare of trust and fear in a world primed for explosion into a war on many fronts.”
– Luke Alchin-Scolnick, L’esprit Literary Review
“Meticulously realized and yet brazenly fresh, Acid Green Velvet is a marvel of character and situation. Krilanovich writes unlike any other writer.”
– Jeff VanderMeer, author of The Southern Reach Trilogy
“I can’t get over how good this book is. Mix one shot Steinbeck with three each of Kathy Acker, Georges Bataille, and Voltairine de Cleyre, shake, strain through a hobo’s sock, douse with glowing green absinthe, and light the whole thing on fire—it still won’t be as intoxicatingly funny, smart, sexy, and marvelously weird as Acid Green Velvet. Grace Krilanovich writes with ferocity, bottomless courage, and unfailing soul.”
– Ben Ehrenreich, author of Desert Notebooks
“As revealed yet again in her riveting new novel Acid Green Velvet, Grace Krilanovich is singular, mistress of a pitiless psychedelic noir lurking in our American woods just beyond the back window.”
– Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn
“Just as she did with her 'slutty teenage hobo vampire junkie' novel The Orange Eats Creeps, Grace Krilanovich's Acid Green Velvet takes an established genre—in this case the Gothic Western—and blows it into a thousand startlingly unrecognizable pieces. Antecedents here might be Charles Portis, or the sublimely ecstatic terrors of John Hawkes, or even Cormac McCarthy, if McCarthy were low-key way funnier and shorn of his more grandiloquent tendencies, but Krilanovich is that rare thing: a writer so thrillingly, delightfully original, that even such elite comparisons do her a disservice. Acid Green Velvet is amazing.”
– Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine
“With lavishly tactile prose, the amazing Krilanovich returns with a sweeping and vibrant novel that is part thriller, part Western, part philosophy, part poem, all of it further showcasing her vast intelligence and capacity to immerse us in a world and time.”
– Aimee Bender, author of The Butterfly Lampshade
“Impressive... The story becomes as much a tinderbox as the city of Anzar it imagines into being, at once completely California and otherworldly. One strange simmering spectacle.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“I was a huge fan of Grace Krilanovich’s bizarro vampire novel The Orange Eats Creeps when it was published in 2010. I kind of can’t believe it’s been over 15 years since then (vampires indeed), but she is finally back with a second novel. I know absolutely nothing about it, but I am lying ravenously in wait.”
– Emily Temple, LitHub
