Lucy Corin

Lucy Corin’s Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls: A Novel, originally published in 2004,is only similar to the first two books in that it is also concerned with existential angst. Set in a small Florida town, the protagonist is a 13-year-old girl—we never get her name—who has an active, wandering mind. Like McElroy’s Cy, she has an active, restless mind; she returns again and again to the same subjects, each time giving us a slightly different perspective.

What makes this show more work, as with McElroy and Coover, is the powerful use of language to show us that this is not just circular thinking, but rather more of a spiral staircase. The girl’s obsessions are tools for taking us inside her mind, and as she obsesses about serial killers, we begin to wonder if she will become a victim or a predator.

What all these novels have in common—aside from the skillful, literary writing—is an inquiry into the nature of obsession and compulsion as manifestations of the human condition.

Reviewed on Lit/Rant: www.litrant.tumblr.com show less

at some point this book started feeling super in love with itself and its own twee cleverness, and stopped being interesting wrt its apocalyptic story telling. it saved itself in the end, and I'm glad I finished it, but I probably would've enjoyed it more if it was 10-15 more traditional short stories about a variety of world ending events, instead of a hundred paragraphs or one page items that mostly went nowhere at all. McSweeney's!! I WILL NEVER ESCAPE.

Society's obsession is murder and serial killers becomes clear in this work. One passage titled “To be innocent is to be doomed” struck me in an unexplainable way, as if learning about serial killers can help save the main character, or girls in general. Interesting and extremely disturbing at the same time.

Ehhh. For some reason I just couldn't get through the apocalypses. The first three stories were very cool and weird, and the 4-star rating is bases solely on those, because I put the book down a quarter of the way through the apocalypses.

The Eyes of Dogs was great, especially considering I'd recently read [b:Tinder|18113422|Tinder|Sally Gardner|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1377691535s/18113422.jpg|25440424] which is based on the same fairy tale. Madmen was totally weird in a really creepy show more way - I didn't really enjoy reading it necessarily, but it was worth reading. show less