Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls - Reviews

"It is an impressive novel: incisive, beautiful, pathological at times, and very dark."

—DIAGRAM

"Lucy Corin's mesmerizing debut novel is a gorgeous, nervy, creepy piece of fiction, a discursive meditation on adolescence and adulthood, innocence and eveil, power and vulnerability, violence and tenderness, Eros and Thanatos--and how closely linked they are, these ostensible opposites, in human nature."

—BookForum

"Edgy and erotic. Interestingly psychotic."

—American Book Review

"Every sentence breathes and moves in this book, illuminating a stunning lyric sensibility not characteristic of thrillers or crime-based historical novels....The text itself is constructed in narrative limbs, once hacked and strewn about, that Corin bandages together to create a whole, new story."

—Gulf Coast

"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

"Two girls look at the Venus de Milo. 'Somebody has knocked off her arms,' one girl says. 'I could do that,' says the other. Dismemberment is the basic fact of the world they grow up in, a world feeding on stories of rape, kidnapping, murder. But the book opens out from our pulp myths into older stories-like that of Osiris, murdered and dismembered. And in this larger, cyclic perspective, killer and killed, kinds of desire, birth and death fuse in the complex act of the telling through which we shape and in turn are shaped. You won't easily forget this book."

—Rosemarie Waldrop