Ottessa Moshfegh’s Eileen (2015) is one of those good books that makes a meal out of negative feeling and bad energy. High profile by Folly X.O. Staff Picks standards, it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Hemingway Foundation / PEN Award for debut fiction. Even worse than that, it already has a film adaptation. We didn’t know about any of that when we picked it up, however. Instead, we stumbled across Moshfegh on a wikipedia entry for paranoid fiction and wanted to see what her work was about.

Set in a depressed coastal New England town called X-ville in the days leading up to Christmas, Eileen follows the perspective of a secretary at a juvenile prison who spends her days wallowing in self-aggrandizing fantasies. When the ravishingly beautiful and academically accomplished Rebecca Saint John arrives in town with an Ivy League psychology degree to work with the young inmates, her and Eileen’s unlikely friendship accelerates the novel towards its dubious conclusion.

Forget rubbernecking, though. Moshfegh muddles the morality waters to detooth the potency of staring slackjaw at the wreckage of a life in passing. Consider instead the deeper interplay between Eileen’s desires and the everyday cruelty of life in X-ville. The two must converge, and this book is the scar tissue knitted over the gash of fantasy’s lost innocence.

What really makes it great, though, is that the prevailing flavor of life in X-ville is unrelentingly criminal. Eileen daydreams about faking her own abduction, and her attraction to a prison guard named Randy leads to sustained episodes of stalking. You can almost smell the car exhaust, aftershave, and holster leather.

Perfect for: Watching a disaster unfold in meticulous, grimy detail.

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