Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is labeled a novel. But it’s only sort of a novel. It’s sort of a novel, sort of a novel in stories, and sort of a linked short story collection. But whatever it is, and whatever the difference between those are, it works. Lucy Corin’s writing is sharp (meaning both intelligent and prickly). I think a line from Patricia Eakins review says it best: “Corin reinhabits American speech like a psychokiller dressed out in a victim’s skin.” Whoa!

What I like best about Corin’s storytelling in Everyday Psychokillers is how, right in the middle of telling a story, she interjects with thoughts that make you slow down and take notice. Thoughts like this:

“They say, scientists even, that every thought makes a path through your brain, that your brain is a map of what’s happened to it. You think and think and patterns are worn like deer trails through the forest. The deepest marks are the thoughts you repeat. It’s that physical. Enough intersecting ideas can make a pit.”

The linking factor of the book is, of course, psychokillers, but there is much more to these stories than that. As the book blurb says, “Everyday Psychokillers… examines what it means to grow up curious and irrepressible in a culture of girl-killers. The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of south Florida.”But this isn’t “chick-lit,” either. Corin makes the reader “the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.”

It’s brilliant writing and story-telling. Go buy this book! Click here.