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Crystal Lake
Logan Berry
Crystal Lake is a dramedy/camp song/slasher film in the key of OMFG. Berry’s nimble, narcotic prose plays some very dirty games against a backdrop of impeccably designed pages, creating a queasily brilliant experience more akin to theater than to anything literature has heretofore managed to muster. Boundary-defying, extraordinarily intelligent, and gleefully savage, Crystal Lake is both playground and graveyard for a cast of very poisonous personae sure to delight and disorient even the most adventurous reader. — Maryse Meijer
Everything - whether human body, tree or random object - can be perforated, eaten, diseased, everything can be used to perforate, eat and infect, and everything is or can become garbage and waste in this tour de force of hyperintensity. The ambient violence includes the very medium of the text itself, which at times seems to be ekphrastic poem, devoured slasher script and ritual description. — Johannes Goransson
Run-Off Sugar Crystal Lake is a study of the death-obsessed, apocalypse-obsessed, apathetic-sentimental, quaking-at-drugged-out-dance-parties, working-at-low-wage-late-stage-Capitalism-jobs, ditching-summer-camp-activities-and-duties Teenager. Adorable and terrifying, Logan Berry’s American Teens, with their glitchy hearts and their glittery panties, as seen through the eyes of the admiring pre-teen or through the eyes of a camcorder or through the eyes of the dripping and doomy tongue of Theater itself, are wearing their “acid green nightgown[s]” and “gramma fauxhawk mullet[s].” They’re arguing over whether “the song is new or from the 80s” while they get high and get worried. They enact the complex matrix of tumor/thicket and human body/forest in the nightmare that is our Times. The book’s scope shook me/shocked me/thrilled me: it’s about the Pandemic, it’s about sex, it’s about surveillance, it’s about the Friday the 13th series, it’s about horror movies as mirrors/upside down texts, it’s about how “the world won’t stop ending.” It makes poems out of graves, graves out of poems, death into language, a whole season of graves—the season we’ve actually been living but all done up in eye shadow and raver clothes—into theater. It drags its narrative line into a porny map of simultaneities: rage, rampage, circulate. “Is life the symptom/ or the virus?” It’s beautiful to look at and move through: images and typography that gave me the feeling I got as a kid looking at high-res photography books of people partying in various club scenes. Or remember when the Rodarte girls made a horror movie and it was bloody forests and outfits? Or do you enjoy the soundtrack of Phantasm? Do you want to suck on something that mashes up slippery Skeltonic play, crack smoke smell, windex, praying mantises, “doppelgängbanging,” and the taste of your very own soul? Do you like to party? Are you scared? Come to the water’s edge: “Everything looks the same/ from the bottom of a lake.” The “tiaras [are] made of bullet shells & tinsel fluff” and “the kiddos compose[d] a new American flag:/ smileys, hemp leaves, arcane symbology,/ well-endowed anime animals.” Frankly, I just want to live in here. Or at least watch it all shimmer from a spot in my sleepover camp auditorium.— Olivia Cronk
Camp Crystal Lake is on fire, and everything's been exhumed!!! In the burning forest it's impossible to distinguish between the killers, the campers, and the camp counselors.
A cursed book wrought from a cursed planet, Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake is a fetish-object emanating oblique fan fictions and haunted eco-poetics. Where hedonistic teens perform hedonistic plays on an outdoor stage, where Sky Ferreira sings of cow disease, where campers make art out of toxic wreckage–the killers lurk! Berry has created a textualized slasher, brought to you in moldy technicolor splendor, that will fuel your nightmares for years to come.
NOW AVAILABLE /// OCTOBER 31, 2021
About Logan Berry
Logan Berry is the author of Run-off Sugar Crystal Lake (11:11 Press), Transmissions to Artaud (SELFFUCK), Nasim Bleeds Green (forthcoming from Plays Inverse), and another (TBA) project. His essays and interviews have appeared in the Heavy Feather Review, Make Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere. As a Company Member (2014-2018) and the Artistic Director (2018-2021) of the Runaways Lab, he directed theatrical productions that explored the boundaries between performance, poetry, death, disaster, pageantry and technology. After a dozen years in Chicago–working as a writing tutor, call center rep, county jail GED teacher, and residential treatment facility overnight counselor–he recently became nomadic.
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ISBN: 9781948687805 (ebook)
ISBN: 9781948687324 (paperback)