Creep: Crazy Good Audiobook
Book Review by EIC Paige Johnson
Some snub audiobooks assuming your mind will drift too much, but sometimes it’s better for adding inflections that make you reexamine what might’ve seemed duller on the page. For instance, obsessive lists from Creep by Emma van Straaten, read with a Helga Pataki-esque rise and fall or excited stuttering lilt. Plus, plenty of books would remain untouched on my TBR if I didn’t get 15 audiobook hours a month with my regular paid Spotify account. Furthermore, some stories/memoirs aren’t about mull-worthy prose and it makes mindless puzzling/painting/scrapbooking/cooking feel extra productive.
Anyway, this debut is on par with Soft Core by Brittany Newell (perhaps the best book I ever read). Addicting! Like a female You as a house cleaner. A more accessible Marissa Higgins (A Good Happy Girl, another highly recommend) in prose. The Londoner MC even voice-trains herself to sound more charmingly feminine before meeting the object of her affection. The opening pages are about sucking on his toothbrush, how she wants to crawl into his chest like a fox den. He leaves his laptop open and she reads longingly into the minutia of even em dashes in their brief email scheduling. She daydreams about cooking for him, reminding him to take vitamins, show him only she understands him.
Maybe it’s a little obvious she hates everyone but him and he’s her escape from a humdrum, disappointing life. But audio keeps sounding sweet whilst fantasizing about cracking the skulls of other women in her way. Her projections on what her mom must be saying in subtext or what she assumes coworkers must do are hilarious to sad to relatable. Almost memey, how she characterizes her pudgy, chirpy coworkers as “the type who feigns too good for soda but not childish hot chocolate.” Her visiting old folks’ homes or liking children is a good cover for her cold or flighty or impending reputation, even while they can’t hear her mumbling about how they should kill themselves. Very Bateman in the dark comedy of misunderstood dialogue.
Cute collection of lines: “He’s shaving off semicolons and commas” from his jaw. “Laundry-snapping towel seagull white,” “pages revolving in my head like a carousal,” thinking of the womb as always waiting for a guest, the “serpentine lines of his hand,” “watching bloody suns slip into water,” etc. Very poetic like a Jane Austen soliloquy.
Except maybe when I heard, or was mistaken, panties called a lip-sock? Lots of funny fleeting moments: “Every man my age is named James,” the emojis used in place of serious replies, the mismatched reactions of peoples’ faces to what she says/expects.
The binge eating and her imagining being aborted into a sewer were a few wowing stand-out parts. There’s soooo much food mentioned to go with her attention-starved psychosis. (Deliver Me by Elle Nash matches that, also with the longing to be pregnant with a partner you adore but doesn’t stack up IRL.)
This is compelling but the MC’s not too crazy in actions until a quarter in, but that too is American Psycho funny in a light “unreliable” way.
She’s always jealous of her thinner prim sister, which was well-done w/o there even being much dialogue. Feel for her there. So emotional in that one-third section where she seeks out superstitious luck jewelry from her childhood home. We do find out her backstory, which wasn’t what I expected, but it makes the themes of other anguish click louder. (Maybe other reviewers didn’t finish or read the published version, since they say the inciting incident was lacking?) Yet we never find out about her estranged dad. The stunted way the family talks about him I kinda assumed he molested her or spectacularly cheated on the mom/hit them, something like that.
Not a bad end; at least the order was not predictable. Wish we got her being nuts more in-scene. So much of this book is small-scale loony unless the episodes are recapped like a lost episode, a skipping tape, which makes sense for her mental state. Makes me want this a movie more so though. I do wish the last few pages were a little more concretely crazy but that doesn’t undo what fun I had. I’m on the lookout for Emma van Straaten’s next work for sure.
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