The Orchid Eater

Sunshine and surfing. Drugs and grenades. Streetwise preachers and serial killers. There’s a reason the words “troubled” and “youth” go together. Mike James may be young but it would be a stretch to call him troubled. He’s never been laid. He fears he never will be. The only fact of life that seems inevitable is death. Still, it’s summer vacation, a season for optimism, and he’s about to get his very own room for the first time, in a house above glitzy Bohemia Bay. His luck is bound to change! But very bad choices bring bad luck in their wake, and after a night of juvenile mayhem, Mike finds his summer quickly turning into a nightmare. His old friends are disappearing. His new friends can’t be trusted. The only girl he meets is probably an hallucination. So forget about sex. Death, on the other hand…his chances of experiencing that are looking better all the time. First published in 1994, reprinted in France (as part of Gallimard’s classic Série noire line of noir crime novels), this marks the first ebook publication of The Orchid Eater. Reviews: “With unusual insights into the cruel extremism and vulnerability of adolescence, this suspenseful thriller of psychosis and serial killing follows the parallel stories of a young murderer and the boy he might have been in the quiet Southern California town of Bohemia Bay. Laidlaw peoples Bohemia Bay with colorful multidimensional characters, both teenaged and adult, and tells their grisly story with evocative prose in a penetrating, convincing voice. Clever plotting and a lively pace fortify an imaginative, offbeat and often unnerving tale.” – Publishers Weekly “A kind of Dazed and Confused seasoned with psychotics. … Harks back to such illustrious predecessors as Jim Thompson and Ross Macdonald. Adding his own patented brand of sometimes hallucinatory prose…Laidlaw has conjured up a multileveled thriller out of our cultural detritus and shared shame.” – Paul di Filippo, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine “An original tale cut from the fabric of the surreal and nightmares. You’ve never encountered anything as bizarre as Laidlaw’s fiction and his cast of unique characters.” – World of Fandom “One of the most refreshing things about The Orchid Eater is its lack of an intrusive moral overlay. [D]eceptively complex and finely structured. On the surface runs an easily followed, suspenseful story, but at times the careful web of resonance and connection Laidlaw has woven can be glimpsed beneath it.” – Robert K.J. Killheffer, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction “Much about this book reminded me of the small coastal towns and people in John Steinbeck’s fiction. Laidlaw writes with the same flavor, the same attention to the underclass seething with purpose and life beneath the calm exterior of a tourist backwater beach community. It’s rich and wise and the world in it is as real as the one outside our doors.” – Billie Sue Mosiman, “Excellent suspense, with unpredictable twists and turns … racy sexuality and provoking encounters.” – The Bookwatch “Highly recommended.” – K. Ptacek, Mystery Scene

From Publishers Weekly

With unusual insights into the cruel extremism and vulnerability of adolescence, this suspenseful thriller of psychosis and serial killing follows the parallel stories of a young murderer and the boy he might have been in the quiet Southern California town of Bohemia Bay. After several years of street life and wandering, Lupe Diaz arrives in Bohemia to settle a score with his older brother Sal. Lupe blames Sal for his brutal castration (cauterized by blowtorch) at the hands of a gang. As might be expected, Lupe's psychological scars are far worse than his physical ones and he finds comfort in collecting a ghostly gang of victims. The drug-peddling Sal has a gang of his own, a group of gay runaways he shelters in his Bohemia Bay house. Elsewhere in town, Mike James, a bright, artistic high school student, finds an outlet for his thirst for action in a group of semi-delinquents from the local alternative school, led by an ex-con, ex-biker turned Bible-thumping Peter Pan. When some gay-bashing pranks bring Mike into contact with Sal and the dangerous Lupe, the three gangs collide with murderous results. Laidlaw ( Kalifornia ) peoples Bohemia Bay with colorful multidimensional characters, both teenaged and adult, and tells their grisly story with evocative prose in a penetrating, convincing voice. Clever plotting and a lively pace fortify an imaginative, offbeat and often unnerving tale. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The Southern California turf of two gangs becomes a nightmare area for teenaged Mike, whose parents purchase a home in an affluent community. One group, misfits collected by the religion-spouting Hawk, pits itself against the young gays headed by the drug-dealing Sal. Rivalry turns to terror and violence upon the arrival of Sal's younger brother, a physically and psychologically damaged murderer who steals the key to Mike's new home. The author of Kalifornia ( LJ 12/92; Word of Mouth, p. 216) misses his target here in an uneasy blend of suspense and the rite-of-passage genre. Despite his novel's surface characterization and lack of tension, Laidlaw is an interesting writer whose style somewhat redeems this cautionary tale. For comprehensive modern fiction collections.- Eric W. Johnson, Teikyo Post Univ. Lib., Waterbury, Ct.Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Another well-written but depressing dystopian thriller by Laidlaw (Kalifornia, 1992; Dad's Nuke, 1985). Laidlaw always enjoys drawing truly screwed up families, with neighborhood wars in Dad's Nuke and a new baby that turns out to be a living processor of nuclear waste, and a family in Kalifornia so crazily cooked up that its deformities can't be encapsuled in a sentence. This time, we have the orphaned brothers, Sal Diaz, an open gay who teaches karate and tai chi and drives around in a black van looking for young boys to seduce, and Lupe Diaz, who bears a bright switchblade and looks girlishly smoothfaced because he has no testicles (he dreams that they were burned off with a blowtorch), though he does have an imaginary gang he carries around in his head. Let's add--in clearing up the title--that the Greek root for ``testicle'' means orchid (as in orchidectomy). And then there's the ex-con biker Hawk, a Bible-beater who more or less invents his own Jesus for his band of youthful converts--Hank's girlfriend calls him Peter Pan. Lupe has been released from the hospital and comes looking for Sal in Shangri-La, a part of Bohemia Bay where Hawk's gang gathers somewhere outside of Los Angeles. Then there's high-school art student Mike James, who draws dragons and has fallen in with a low-brow gang from the Alternative School. As it happens, Lupe is an artist as well as a rather femininely attractive serial killer, though his sketches are of his victims whose life-power he has eaten--that mute gang crawling around in his head ``like baby rats.'' Everybody belongs to some gang, and Hawk's and Sal's gangs fall out, and make peace--but then Sal's found dead with Hawk's crucifix up his rectum.... The urge for gang buddyhood among boys is woven with the obsessions of a serial killer their age bent on eating...orchids. Not heartwarming. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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