Erica L. Satifka

I received a free copy of the book from the publisher. Stay Crazy will be released on August 16th.

Satifka's debut novel straddles genre lines like many of the complicated, dark stories that publisher Apex publishes in its magazine. The book's description makes it sound weird and perhaps fluffy, and while it is weird in many ways, there's also a thorough and often raw exploration of mental illness.

In a way, it's a dystopia novel set in modern small town America; the place is blighted, and its show more one shining beacon of commerce is the Walmart-esque Savertown. Em is fresh out of the mental hospital when she begins work at Savertown. Everything in her life seems brittle: her life with her mother and sister is miserable, her father--who she is supposed to resemble in most ways--vanished when she was a child, her therapist goes through the motions, her relationships with her co-workers are strained, often due to Em's constant snark. Em is not always a likeable protagonist. She's hopeless, tactless, and angry, but also someone I deeply sympathized with. I know depression and isolation. Satifka captured those feelings in a way that disturbed me at times, causing me to set the book down so that I could separate the book from my own emotions.

Also, I want to note this without giving away spoilers: this isn't a book that tries to equate mental illness with supernatural powers. Em's mental state is much more complicated than that.

There's another element that she captured well, too: retail life. I did time as a Walmart night stocker. Satifka NAILED the fine details there, everything from calling the general merchandise side "GM," to the rivalry between GM and the grocery side, to the forced singing of company propaganda sings to start the shift.

Stay Crazy is dark and intense sci-fi with a twist, in turns disturbing, amusing, and enlightening. It's not a book that fits into tidy genre boxes, so kudos to Apex for publishing a book that is that complicated--and good. show less

A paranoid schizophrenic with delusional tendencies, Em takes a job in a store as part of her rehabilitation. Whilst there, she starts hearing, communicating via the merchandise, the voice of a being from another dimension who claims that she is the only person able to stop a mysterious 'entity' from destroying his world.

Em's fragile mental state and reluctance to take her medication blur the lines between fantasy and reality, leaving the reader unsure which events are real, which are purely show more in Em's mind, and which are a combination of the two.

A well-written book, this had me engaged from start to finish.

*i received a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review show less

"Sometimes knowing isn't enough. Isn't that what I learned about my hallucinations? Just knowing this is a product of the entity doesn't make it any less real when I'm in its grip."

Stay Crazy is told from the perspective of Emmeline, a girl who's struggling with a mental illness that makes her hallucinate and gives her paranoia induced anxiety attacks. In order to get her life on track again her mother pushes her to get a job at a local store. Soon weird things start happening: one after the show more other the employees start killing themselves even when they have never shown any kind of depressive disorder. At first Em doesn't think much about the matter but when a man from a different plane of existence, Escodex, contacts her through a box of chicken nuggets the paranoia starts again: is she having another hallucination? Is her mental illness worsening? Could Escodex be in fact real? What Escodex tells her is that an evil entity has hopped into Em's dimension through a nexus that is placed in her store and that this entity is slowly draining the employees' energy by feeding on it. Em's job is to help Escodex putting an end to this situation because it could lead to the end of everything. At first Em is of course skeptical, surely she's forgotten to take the right medications, but when this world starts getting realer and realer she decides to give Escodex a chance and accepts to help him. Plus he's promised her he'll help her finding her missing father once everything will be resolved.

"Does this sound a little crazy? Well, brace yourselves boys, this ride's just beginning."

What conviced me to request this title was, and I'm not afraid to admit it, the bit in the synopsis that says "Escodex begins talking to Em from a box of frozen chicken nuggets" because it sounded just like my kind of weird and I actually enjoyed the first half of this book but then not so much. The story didn't seem to go anywhere and every situation seemed disconnected from the other. The characters were kinda one dimensional if we exclude Em (whose internal dialogues were actually snarky and funny) and the overall plot seemed to be all over the place. I wasn't interested into the story's outcome and not once I felt invested by what the characters were going through. I believe that the author could have explored her world better, she focused a lot more on Em's illness and supposed romantic life but not on the development of her story. The original idea was very interesting and I enjoyed how eerie the setting could get. If you pick this book as a light read you might as well enjoy it but since I was expecting an actual sci-fi I was a bit disappointed. show less

What happens when a girl from a small town hears voices that tell her to save the world? Is it sci-fi or delusions? I'll leave that up to you.

This book is an enjoyable read with a believable protagonist (even if I don't always believe what she tells me). I'd say this is definitely worth taking a look at.