Everyday Psychokillers
A History for Girls, A Novel
By Lucy Corin
University of Alabama Press, Fiction Collective 2
Interweaving history, myth, rumor, and news, this first novel explores what it means to grow up as a girl in a culture of girl-killers
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.
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.
'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
Lucy Corin is assistant professor in the English department at James Madison University. Her short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals and twice in Algonquin's New Stories from the South, the Year's Best anthology series. Corin was first published by FC2 in 1996 in New Women's Fiction Anthology, Chick-Lit 2 (No Chick Vics).
