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?
The Orange Eats Creeps never gives us a definitive answer, nor should it. The ambiguity is part of the point.