Edendale
***FINALIST 2020 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year***
"Edendale is a sly and smart novel that contains multitudes-itʼs strange, funny, dark, violent, frightening, compelling, and mysterious. Jacquelyn Stolos takes many exciting risks on the page, and together these risks accumulate to become a powerful and unique story about young, alienated people trying to find their way in an inhospitable world."-Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California
In northeast Los Angeles, wildfires rage and coyotes stalk the neighborhood streets. The wind blows heavy with smoke and, inside a rented bungalow on hilly Lemoyne Street, the air grows heavy with something else.
Ropey closes his checking account and transfers his net worth to his sock drawer. Megan sharpens pencils and chops produce to obsession. Lyle tightens his grip on his girlfriend Egypt, whose growing dependence makes her question everything, especially Lyle. And Captain America, the cat of the house, finds his orange coat giving way to a nest of bleeding sores. As the fires burn ever closer, will the four friends wake up to their false paradise?
Jacquelyn Stolos' eco-horror debut explores the ways rape culture can permeate relationships of all kinds, making us examine our agency in our own lives and the world at large.
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". . . Stolos' tale of horror ultimately proves that those close to you can be the scariest things in your environment"-ALA Booklist
"The book . . . train[s] its attention on the noxious consequences of late-capitalism, student debt, sexual violence, and the environmental crisis. Edendale has been described as both feminist-horror and eco-horror, but it is also a work of neoliberal horror, especially interested in the protracted state of childhood that young people are forced into today . . . Stolos's debut announces her as a powerful ethnographer of our time."-Tess Gunty, Necessary Fiction
"Edendale is a sly and smart novel that contains multitudes-itʼs strange, funny, dark, violent, frightening, compelling, and mysterious. Jacquelyn Stolos takes many exciting risks on the page, and together these risks accumulate to become a powerful and unique story about young, alienated people trying to find their way in an inhospitable world."-Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of California
"Edendale is familiar and yet unsettling, like all great horror-tinged tales. This is a novel that really understands how people in their 20s live in Los Angeles; cool-girl lit that evokes the haunted undercurrents that characterize this city. As I devoured it, I felt it devouring me back. I could smell the smoke in the air."-Catie Disabato, author of The Ghost Network
"I really love Jacquelyn Stolosʼs Edendale. Itʼs realistic and apocalyptic at the same time, and captures the great complexity of youth, especially youth in California. The characters herein are funny, sweet, gentle, loving, irresponsible, callous, and somewhat disgraceful. And Stolos captures each of them with an abiding sympathy that does not conflict with an admirable wish to tell the truth about humans and their sometimes calamitous decision making. This is a first novel with a big heart by a writer to watch."-Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm and Hotels of North America
"Like Girls by way of Edan Lepucki, Edendale is a sharp millennial look at the slow, devastating apocalypses that stalk us all, be they personal, sexual, global. As the alliances of her four characters shift (flighty, fascinating, infuriating Egypt forever at the center) with each change of the Santa Anas, Stolos uses evocative and surprising prose to illustrate a Los Angeles on fire-from without and within. I loved it."-Halley Sutton, author of The Lady Upstairs
