Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, A Novel [Paperback]

Lucy Corin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 28, 2004

In Everyday Psychokillers spectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, a lurid extravaganza in which all those around the narrator seem vicarious participants. And at its center are the interchangeable young girls, thrilling to know themselves the object of so much desire and terror.

The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these preposterously commonplace figures all know is that murder is identity: "Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he's done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn't exist."

Everyday Psychokillers reaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Corin reinhabits American speech like a psychokiller dressed out in a victim's skin. Her splintered perspective cracks the glossy landscape of commodification to reveal an unsettling intimacy with danger. It seeps through bandages of history and myth like blood from the torn-apart body of the ancient Egyptian god Osiris, falling apart in the arms of his sister-wife Isis. Corin anatomizes the eternal embrace of what saves and what kills, refusing to compromise the complexity of experience and language. There is no escape-not even in irony. Hers is a fully awakened sensibility." -Patricia Eakins, author of The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste

Book Description

A debut novel about growing up curious in a world of violence

In Everyday Psychokillers spectacular violence is the idiom of everyday life, a lurid extravaganza in which all those around the narrator seem vicarious participants. And at its center are the interchangeable young girls, thrilling to know themselves the object of so much desire and terror.

The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a Caribbean slave turned pirate, a circus performer living in a box, broken horses, a Seminole chief in a swamp, and a murderous babysitter. What these preposterously commonplace figures all know is that murder is identity: "Of course what matters really is the psychokiller, what he's done, what he threatens to do. Of course to be the lucky one you have to be abducted in the first place. Without him, you wouldn't exist."

Everyday Psychokillers reaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 223 pages
• Publisher: Fiction Collective 2; 1 edition (February 28, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573661120
• ISBN-13: 978-1573661126
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #580,758 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lucy Corin's short stories have been published in numerous journals, including Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, the Mid-American Review, and Conjunctions, and anthologized in the collections The Iowa Anthology of Innovative Fiction (Iowa University Press, 1994) and New Stories for the South: The Year's Best (Algonquin Books, 1997 and 2003).

Corin's latest novel, The Entire Predicament, was published by Tin House in 2007. Her first novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls was published by FC2 in 2004. Currently, she teaches English at the University of California, Davis.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A world unto itself, February 19, 2005

By 

Gentle Reader (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, A Novel (Paperback)

I teach literature so I never get to get drunk on novels the way I did before I got my Ph.D. (it's always, how can I teach this?). However, this one got me and kept me up far too late into the night. It perfectly gets the self-referential world of preteenhood and adolescence, where everything is life-sized and there is often no "out" except your own stubborn sense of what makes no sense. Holden Caulfield's genuineness always struck me as incredibly phony; Corin's narrator interacts with her often deadened surroundings not by pointing out their pointlessness but by animating them from within. Yes, read Corin before the media makes her into something other than the precious dork her narrator suggests she is.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Very, very fine, October 26, 2005

By 

Ander Monson (Grand Rapids, Michigan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, A Novel (Paperback)

I love how one reviewer here is comparing this book to _Heart of Darkness_: that's probably a little bit over the top, but I can see some of the connections--the book's dark, meditative, heavy on language, dense, and very, very fine. Quite unconventional in its methods and its meditations, Everyday Psychokillers is extremely enjoyable provided you're open to what it's going after. If you're looking for a crime novel, this isn't it, but if you're looking for something beautiful and moving exploring the mythology of this thing we call the psychokiller especially from the perspective of a girl, then this should--rightfully--blow you away. For those who are familiar with the press, FC2, this is more conventional than you'd expect given their editorial interests while still not exactly being straightforward narrative. For those more used to the bigger presses, this will be a surprise for you, a gem, something to covet and keep close to you for years. Creepy, lovely, forceful, excellent.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not a classic, but an forebearer of classics, May 22, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls, A Novel (Paperback)

Look, some novels are instant classics, and then the writer never achieves the same success. Salinger, Heller, etc. This isn't one, BUT: Did I like this book? Yes I did. Should you buy it? Yes you should. Am I being Rumsfeldian via my answering my own questions? Yes, I am. But this is an author who won't be limited by a novel that shows off her prowess immediately. She will continue to delve into her subject matter, psychologically and aesthetically. This is a feminist novel in its currently most developed state, and will lead to a further exploration of truly groundbreaking themes. There is much in this book that forces the reader to recognize a literary talent, and then obligates the reader to wait for more. I didn't like this book as much as I've liked some others by "canon" authors, but if you don't read it now, you'll regret it later. Tolstoy and Nabokov are better, but this is gold and deserves to be read. I was happily amazed by the constant reinvention of everyday scenarios and the gravity of the intricate plotline(s). It was a pleasure. You might as well save yourself the effort of catching up with Lucy Corin later and read this now; so just buy the book, read it, and wait, as opposed to breathlessly catching a bandwagon later. It's rare to be able to follow the development of a talented writer with the current economic conditions, so you might as well pick a really good one such as Lucy Corin, right? You'll enjoy "Everyday Psychokillers...," and you'll enjoy her later releases as well, I'm sure. Perhaps not a classic, but a "must buy" for fans of literate literature.