The breathtaking and consequential first novel in nearly two decades from the award-winning author of the cult sensation, The Orange Eats Creeps . "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 In the late 19th century on the central California coast, two wayward young hoboes — Paulette and Kenneth — threaten to kill a menacing man who wronged them: Paulette’s father, Rodney Eligon. A handful of years later, the 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 itinerant 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. "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 "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 GRACE KRILANOVICH is the author of The Orange Eats Creeps , a finalist for The Believer Book Award and the Indie Booksellers’ Choice Award in 2010, and reissued in 2025 for Two Dollar Radio’s New Classics series. Her work has appeared in Black Clock, The Rumpus, The Comics Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books , and elsewhere. She was a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree in 2010. She lives in Los Angeles.