Acid Green Velvet

ABOUT Acid Green Velvet will be released on September 8, 2026. We are pleased to offer a special hardcover edition, limited to 400 copies, to feature an original illustration by Grace Krilanovich and signed by the author, which are now available for pre-order. To pre-order, click on the drop-down menu above and selected "Limited Edition Hardcover Signed by the Author." You may also pre-order the original paperback edition, to feature gatefold and deckled edges. "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 The breathtaking and consequential first novel in nearly two decades from the award-winning author of the cult sensation, The Orange Eats Creeps. In the late 19th century on a remote California beach, two young tramps — Paulette and Kenneth — threaten to kill a menacing man who wronged them: Paulette’s father, Rodney Eligon. A handful of years later, the Central Coast town of Anzar has become the stomping grounds for all manner of cults, eccentrics, earth religions, and communal living. Presiding over the town from the luxe frivolity of their family manor, the Hasleys have ruled Anzar for generations. Their grip on the town is threatened by the rise of the working class, and their union with the vagrant population. Meanwhile, Paulette has taken up residence in the home of Johnny Hasley, a wealthy faux-socialist poseur, hoping to become his wife. Her plans are complicated by boot-prints in the garden signaling the arrival of Kenneth, who carries with him a dark secret that poses a grave threat to both of them. In Anzar’s cracked mirror, Californian freakiness meets Victorian preoccupations with the domestic, pollution and filth, haunted houses, fringe societies, living death, spiritualism, vampiric women, and class parasites. Acid Green Velvet is a surreal powder keg of nihilism, fathers and their failures, manifest destiny, and American identity, penned in rapturous prose by the fiercest writer of her generation. Reviews Cover reveal at Electric Literature. * A Most Anticipated Book of 2026. —LitHub "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 "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 "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 "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 Praise for Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps: Grace Krilanovich was recognized by the National Book Foundation as a "5 under 35" honoree in 2010. In 2006, the National Book Foundation established the 5 Under 35 prize to recognize young, debut fiction writers whose work promised to leave a lasting impression on the literary landscape.  "Krilanovich's work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins." —Rachel Syme, NPR "I remember reading this novel when it came out in 2010, and gasping audibly at the audacity of its rule-breaking: this was a novel unlike any I had read before, and boy was it fun, and weird, and gross, and punk. I never hear people talking about it these days, but they should be: it’s a careening, side-elbowing nightmare of a book that you should definitely read if you liked Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream." —Emily Temple, Lit Hub "The 50 Best Contemporary Novels Under 200 Pages" "The degree of 'speculativeness' in Grace Krilanovich’s beautifully bewildering debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, is a matter of opinion—are Krilanovich’s drug-addled teenagers wandering the Pacific northwest in the nineties really vampires, or is their 'vampireness' more a metaphor for a profoundly deranged inner state? ... In The Orange Eats Creeps, the quest for answers is a viciously thrilling one. —Laura van den Berg, Tor.com "That Was Awesome! Writers on Writing": "Ambiguous Vampirism: The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich" "Rimbaud, Huysmans, Kiernan, Brite–they’re all in there, along with a very dark, almost malevolent sense of humor. Luckily, the author doesn’t hamstring the text by trying to pull back, trying to make the narrator seem nice at any point or non-judgmental, or even the text itself... The excitement and originality of this novel are created by the reader’s explorations of it along the way, through the narrator’s unique perspective–her way of seeing (and not seeing) things, and the language, which continues to surprise and challenge long after you’ve finished the book." —Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy (Read the full review of The Orange Eats Creeps) "Yes, Krilanovich's debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, is about vampires—but it is about as far from Twilight as one can get. The novel is more of a horror story in free verse, with bloodthirsty teen punks roaming around the Pacific Northwest of the 1990s, drugging and boozing and taking in basement rock shows. The book feels written in a fever; it is breathless, scary and like nothing I've ever read before... Krilanovich's work will make you believe that new ways of storytelling are still emerging from the margins." —Rachel Syme, NPR (Read the full review on NPR) "This is the story of a girl with 'drug-induced ESP' who is searching for her lost foster sister, a surreal vision of her lost life, a narrative that is disjointed, fragmented, and surprisingly touching. I have to admit that I struggled with this book at first, until I realized that I had to let go what I thought a book should be, what a story should be, and just let the book take me over. This book has been compared to such challenging and visionary voices as William Burroughs, William Blake, Céline and Henry Rollins, and reading the blurbs by Steve Erickson and Brian Evenson, I was immediately reminded of their work as well. It’s a wild ride, and this book is not for everyone." —Richard Thomas, The Nervous Breakdown "A Conversation About The Orange Eats Creeps with Richard Thomas and Blake Butler" "This, line by line, worked. Every line from beginning on was placed there by a wise, surprising hand... I know this will be a book I read again and again over the years; it will not be artifice on my shelf, it will be a space." —Blake Butler, The Nervous Breakdown "A Conversation About The Orange Eats Creeps with Richard Thomas and Blake Butler" "The most stunning transitions in The Orange Eats Creeps do seem conjured, perhaps supernatural." —Gabriel Blackwell, Hobart AN INTERVIEW WITH GRACE KRILANOVICH (October 1, 2010) "In many ways, [The Orange Eats Creeps] is a novel about the horror of physical experience; about the organic and psychic detritus of an alienated world; about eating the self and shitting it out; about consumption, apocalypse, and fear... It’s a novel that teaches new ways of reading, and points towards a poetic fiction meshing genre, form, image and psyche into a tangled, hallucinatory, beautiful mess." —Vicky Osterweil, The New Inquiry "Adolescence of the Undead" "One of 2010's small-press triumphs." —The Week "Novel of the week: The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich" "Grace Krilanovich’s first book is a steamy cesspool of language that stews psychoneurosis and viscera into a horrific new organism—the sort of muck in which Burroughs, Bataille, and Kathy Acker loved to writhe." —The Believer  "This is the number one book I have purchased for friends and family, have recommended, have quoted, have furiously dog-eared, underlined, and marked up. This is a book with a heart that pulses, and while you’re not going to get a sense of arc or resolution, that’s the point—that’s the horror. Krilanovich leaves you stranded in a ghostly ocean of beautiful, yet alienating, lyrical syntax." —Kia Groom, Quaint Magazine "Rimbaud, Huysmans, Kiernan—they're all in there, along with a very dark and satisfyingly malevolent sense of humor... The real and the phantasmagorical combine in a chemical reaction." —Omnivoracious "A relentless existential nightmare as baffling as it is brilliant. Krilanovich dispenses with so many writing norms that the reader is required to figure out a new way to read. It's a thrilling ride." —Shelf Unbound Magazine Top 10 Books for 2010 "The Orange Eats Creeps is a relentless existentialist nightmare told from the point of view of a nameless female hobo vampire junkie." —Shelf Unbound Magazine "Interview: Grace Krilanovich Author of The Orange Eats Creeps" (AUG 10, 2015) "This one is a must read." —Black Book "In [Krilanovich's] impressively weird surreal-horror novel The Orange Eats Creeps, 'vampire hobo junkies' rampage around Portland and its burbs. Think Twilight on the urban growth boundary—except actually interesting." —Portland Monthly Magazine "One of the more interesting literary experiences in recent times. The Orange Eats Creeps is sure to make an impression." —The Cult "Potent and entirely original." —Powell's Review-a-Day "This time the awesome comes in the form of Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. Hobo vampire junkies, Robitussin and Twin Peaks references equal intrigue in a smash of the high and low... Grace was nice enough to tell us what she's been reading lately..." —Josh Spilker, Impose Magazine "5 RECENT READS WITH GRACE KRILANOVICH" "The Orange Eats Creeps contains the hallucinatory, disjointed, plotless, yet bizarrely charming ravings of a young refugee from foster care who now belongs to a pack of teenage hobo vampires that rove convenience stores and supermarkets high on Robitussin and mop buckets of coffee. These feral, trashed-out bloodsuckers have nothing to do with the Twilight crowd, devoid as they are of sex appeal or commercial potential." —Newsday "This novel is like notorious punk-rocker GG Allin showing up at a Green Day concert. Krilanovich build[s] characters that most other first-time novelists wouldn't dare attempt, and she writes it all in unrestrained profane language that you wouldn't expect from someone garnering serious mainstream praise. [The Orange Eats Creeps is a] nervy novel. This is fiction defined by its distaste for moderation." —The Dominion "Forget about trite vampire books. In Grace Krilanovich's bold debut novel, The Orange Eats Creeps, her undead protagonists are "immoral shithead" junkies, thirsty for blood and cough syrup." —Nylon "Beautiful and deranged. [Krilanovich] nails the shaky worldview of a supernatural teen narco-insomniac... Being undead, here, is the defining paradox of the teenage female experience: to be both immortal and rapidly aging." —Adam Wilson, Bookforum (Read the full review of The Orange Eats Creeps) "Grace Krilanovich's The Orange Eats Creeps rewrites both the vampire novel and fiction in general. Come[s] close to performing a lobotomy on the reader. Screams with a post-punk adrenaline, like Nightwood on really bad acid." —Ashley Crawford, 21c Magazine "If Black Hole is a mythology of adolescence in Seattle in the 1970s, then Krilanovich's book picks up the reins twenty years later, only slightly to the south in central Oregon. By the end, Krilanovich's narrator has encountered and embraced her own personal form of hell, which in its horror also contains a great beauty." —Anne K. Yoder, The Millions "Vampires, Inner Demons, and a Desirable Form of Hell in Grace Krilanovich’s The Orange Eats Creeps" (Read the full review of The Orange Eats Creeps) "[The Orange Eats Creeps is] raw and seething. It snatches up the reader and doesn't let go until the surprising twist at the end, which is perhaps the most frightening part of the book. The result is a creepy uneasiness and an impulse to look over your shoulder." —Samantha Ecker Angerame, The Brooklyn Rail (Read the full review of The Orange Eats Creeps) "Excellent. It is a slippery novel. It will never lay still and compromising in your hands. Language charges this book. It provides regular reward from one sentence to the next." —Darby M. Dixon III, The Collagist (Read the full review of The Orange Eats Creeps) "A hallucinatory deluge, a place where the present a