Stay Crazy

by Erica L. Satifka

After a breakdown at college landed Emmeline Kalberg in a mental hospital, she's struggling to get her life on track. She's back in her hometown and everyone knows she's crazy, but the twelve pills she takes every day keep her anxiety and paranoia in check. So when a voice that calls itself Escodex begins talking to Em from a box of frozen chicken nuggets, she's sure that it's real and not another hallucination. Well … pretty sure.

An evil entity is taking over the employees of Savertown USA, sucking out their energy so it can break into Escodex's dimension. When her coworkers start dying, Em realizes that she may be the only one who can stop things from getting worse. Now she must convince her therapist she's not having a relapse and keep her boss from firing her. All while getting her coworker Roger to help enact the plans Escodex conveys to her though the RFID chips in the Savertown USA products. It's enough to make anyone Stay Crazy.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Fantasy, Mental Health, Mental Illness, Magical Realism, Science Fiction Fantasy

254 pages, Paperback

First published August 16, 2016

About the author

Erica L. Satifka is the author of over forty published short stories, which have appeared in such places as Clarkesworld Magazine, Shimmer, Interzone, and The Dark. Her debut novel Stay Crazy (Apex Publications). won the 2017 British Fantasy Award for Best Newcomer, and her rural cyberpunk novella Busted Synapses was released in 2020 by Broken Eye Books. Originally from Pittsburgh, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband/editor Rob and an indeterminate amount of cats.

Reviews

[Lindsay · Rating 3 out of 5]

A walk through severe mental illness with an unreliable narrator and an intangible, invisible alien.

Emmeline ("Em") is a paranoid schizophrenic with depressive tendencies. We follow her as she leaves the mental hospital where she's been since a psychotic break three weeks into college. Em is smart, but her medications and mental issues leave her unable to do much except take a job at the local Savertown USA. The place where suicide is a weekly event and the chicken nuggets talk to her, telling her that they're a creature named Escodex from another dimension and only she can help it.

Em is prickly and has trouble with relationships. It doesn't help that her missions for Escodex aren't appreciably different from psychotic episodes leaving the reader wondering through most of the book whether her experiences are real or artifacts of her perception issues. When her mother and sister refer to events that Em doesn't even mention in her narrative it's very clear just how unreliable a narrator she is.

Overall this reminded me very strongly of The Drowning Girl by Caitlín R. Kiernan with much more of a dry cynical sense of humor. Like that one I found this profoundly disturbing; the author brings sever mental illness to the page really well. And also like the Drowning Girl I found the book more to be appreciated than enjoyed for this reason.

[Frank Errington · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review Copy

I really didn't know what to expect with Stay Crazy. An unfamiliar author and a story which didn't drop neatly into one of my preferred genres, but I'm very happy that I took a chance on this one.

Em is a paranoid schizophrenic with depressive tendencies. She is being treated for her illness, but like many people she struggles with staying on her meds. When she starts working part-time at a local big box store, she is contacted by a being from another dimension who attempts to recruit her to fight an entity intent on destroying everything.

I know what you're thinking. She's crazy. But what if the threat were real, who would believe her. When suicides among her co-workers at Savertown USA become a regular occurrence, Em begins to wonder if the voice in her head is something more than her particular brand of crazy.

It's tough to categorize this story, "weird" would probably be the best one word description. Just the right amount of crazy, with a touch of quirky.

I did laugh-out-loud more than once while reading Stay Crazy. For a debut novel its really a well-written and fun story.

Published by Apex Book Company, Stay Crazy is available in both paperback and e-book formats.

From the author's bio - Erica Satifka is a writer who enjoys rainy days, questioning reality, ignoring her to-do list, and adding to her collection of tattoos. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarksworld, Shimmer, Lightspeed, and Intergalactic Medicine Show. Erica is originally from Pittsburgh. She now lives in Portland, Oregon with her spouse Rob and an indeterminate number of cats.

[Beth Cato · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received a free copy of the book from the publisher. Stay Crazy will be released on August 16th.

Satifka's debut novel straddles genre lines like many of the complicated, dark stories that publisher Apex publishes in its magazine. The book's description makes it sound weird and perhaps fluffy, and while it is weird in many ways, there's also a thorough and often raw exploration of mental illness.

In a way, it's a dystopia novel set in modern small town America; the place is blighted, and its one shining beacon of commerce is the Walmart-esque Savertown. Em is fresh out of the mental hospital when she begins work at Savertown. Everything in her life seems brittle: her life with her mother and sister is miserable, her father--who she is supposed to resemble in most ways--vanished when she was a child, her therapist goes through the motions, her relationships with her co-workers are strained, often due to Em's constant snark. Em is not always a likeable protagonist. She's hopeless, tactless, and angry, but also someone I deeply sympathized with. I know depression and isolation. Satifka captured those feelings in a way that disturbed me at times, causing me to set the book down so that I could separate the book from my own emotions.

Also, I want to note this without giving away spoilers: this isn't a book that tries to equate mental illness with supernatural powers. Em's mental state is much more complicated than that.

There's another element that she captured well, too: retail life. I did time as a Walmart night stocker. Satifka NAILED the fine details there, everything from calling the general merchandise side "GM," to the rivalry between GM and the grocery side, to the forced singing of company propaganda sings to start the shift.

Stay Crazy is dark and intense sci-fi with a twist, in turns disturbing, amusing, and enlightening. It's not a book that fits into tidy genre boxes, so kudos to Apex for publishing a book that is that complicated--and good.

[Annamaria · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Sometimes knowing isn't enough. Isn't that what I learned about my hallucinations? Just knowing this is a product of the entity doesn't make it any less real when I'm in its grip."

Stay Crazy is told from the perspective of Emmeline, a girl who's struggling with a mental illness that makes her hallucinate and gives her paranoia induced anxiety attacks. In order to get her life on track again her mother pushes her to get a job at a local store. Soon weird things start happening: one after the other the employees start killing themselves. At first Em doesn't think much about the matter but when a man from a different plane of existence, Escodex, contacts her through a box of chicken nuggets the paranoia starts again: is she having another hallucination? Is her mental illness worsening? Could Escodex be in fact real? What Escodex tells her is that an evil entity has hopped into Em's dimension through a nexus that is placed in her store and that this entity is slowly draining the employees' energy by feeding on it. Em's job is to help Escodex putting an end to this. At first Em is of course skeptical, surely she's forgotten to take the right medications, but when this world starts getting realer and realer she decides to give Escodex a chance and accepts to help him. Plus he's promised her he'll help her finding her missing father once everything will be resolved.

"Does this sound a little crazy? Well, brace yourselves boys, this ride's just beginning."

What conviced me to request this title was, and I'm not afraid to admit it, the bit in the synopsis that says "Escodex begins talking to Em from a box of frozen chicken nuggets" because it sounded just like my kind of weird and I actually enjoyed the first half of this book but then not so much. The story didn't seem to go anywhere and every situation seemed disconnected from the other. The characters were kinda one dimensional if we exclude Em (whose internal dialogues were actually snarky and funny) and the overall plot seemed to be all over the place. I wasn't interested into the story's outcome and not once I felt invested by what the characters were going through. I believe that the author could have explored her world better, she focused a lot more on Em's illness and supposed romantic life but not on the development of her plot. The original idea was very interesting and I enjoyed how eerie the setting could get. If you pick this book as a light read you might as well enjoy it but since I was expecting an actual sci-fi I was a bit disappointed.

I was kindly granted the ARC of this book from LibraryThing.

[M.P. Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The way this book handles heavy mental health issues and messes with the unreliable narrator without sacrificing humor and action is impressive. Overall this is a fun, thoughtful read that is worth checking out.

[Justin Isis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Science fiction, worth getting for the strictly realistic elements as well.

[Ethan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. I purchased this from the author at Worldcon in 2016, and I wish I had read it sooner. Maybe in another dimension some other version of me did.

The blurb on the cover compares Satifka to Philip K. Dick, which is somewhat apt, especially if you, like me, appreciate the weird humor of Dick's writing that the movie adaptations never get right. But Satifka is also her own author with her own style, weirdness, and sense of humor. I laughed out loud a lot while reading this, which you might not expect from a book about mental illness, soulless big box retail stores, small town despair, and inter-dimensional warfare.

The main character, Em, is not always likable per se, but I love her snark, especially when she's interacting with assholes. And her relationships with her mom and her sister are fraught but also tender in their own way. I imagine Em as one of those friends you may only want to hang out with in small doses, but love just the same.

The plot of the book isn't so much hard to explain as it's so weird that my description wouldn't do it justice. The plot description gives you some idea of what to expect. My advice: just go with it. It's fun.

The book deals with a lot of difficult topics: mental illness, the economic hellscape of small town America, the structure of reality itself. Did Em really do all the things she thinks she did? Probably, but it's hard to say. Did she grow as a character? Definitely. And did I as the reader enjoy the ride? For sure.

My blog review! https://examinedworlds.blogspot.com/2...

[Tammy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The nitty-gritty: A laugh-out-loud spoof of super stores and inter-dimensional invasion, with surprising human moments intertwined with the humor.

Nothing ever changes here, she thought as she removed her shirt, again dreaming of the day she would be allowed to cast off this place. She would take Kevin and together the two of them would steal his sister’s car and drive off into the sunset. Where would they end up? Not Pittsburgh. They had to think bigger.

The striking graphic novel-like cover immediately drew me to this book, but I was also captured by the story of a slightly unlikable girl named Emmeline who is trying to overcome a mental illness and save the world at the same time. Satifka is a new author for me, and I absolutely loved her writing, and the hilarious dialog between the characters had me chuckling out loud. Em is an interesting protagonist in that she didn’t grab my sympathy until about halfway through the story. She doesn’t have much of a filter and is likely to blurt out inappropriate comments just about everywhere, but she has a good heart and is simply trying to stay afloat after her first year at college goes horribly wrong.  Stay Crazy reminded me a little of Grady Hendrix’s Horrorstör, which also involves an evil entity taking over a retail space, so if you enjoyed that book, you will have a blast with this too.

Nineteen-year-old Emmeline has come home to Clear Falls, after an incident at college left her with gaps in her memory and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Now she’s seeing a therapist and living at home with her mother and sister and trying to figure out what went wrong. Em’s sister Jackie has just found religion and is trying to recruit Em (and Em’s hysterical response to that is “You know we’re Jewish, right?”). And her mom has encouraged her to get a job at the local Savertown USA, where she’s been hired as a stock girl in the frozen food department. Em thinks working at Savertown is the best way to get her life back on track.

That is until one day she hears a voice speaking to her from a box of frozen chicken nuggets. The voice calls itself “Escodex” and he tells Em that an evil entity from another dimension is trying to infiltrate Savertown and ultimately take over the world. Em isn’t sure if she’s actually hearing a voice, or if her mental illness is simply making itself known. But Escodex promises Em that if she helps him stop the entity, he’ll tell her what happened to her father years before, when he walked out one day and never came back.

When employees at Savertown suddenly start dying, Em begins to investigate with the help of a fellow employee named Roger, who can also hear Escodex speak. The entity is about to break through into their world, and it’s up to Em to stop it before things get really crazy.

This book was so funny! I loved the descriptions of Savertown USA (think Walmart or Costco). Just like any workplace, Em has to put up with a whole slew of weird co-workers, including her department manager who is worried about Em’s mental state and a couple of bullies from other departments. Once Em starts seeing manifestations of the entity in some of the less savory employees, things really start to get strange, and when she and Roger come up with a brilliant plan to stop the evil, I stopped worrying about the over-the-top craziness and just enjoyed the ride.

One of the ongoing mysteries of the story involves Em’s father, who left to get cigarettes one day when Em was eight, and never came home. Part of Em’s anxiety involves her worries about whether or not her father loved her, and even though deep down she knows he did, she still wonders if she was the reason he left. And while it’s not a major plot point, it was a welcome side story with big emotional impact. Em’s fondest wish is to find out once and for all what really happened to him, and when Escodex tries to bribe her into helping him, by offering up that answer, Em jumps at the chance, even though she knows that A – Escodex may be lying to her and B – Escodex might not even be real.

Satifka does dialog really well, especially between Em and Jackie. As I mentioned before, one of Em’s charms is her direct way of speaking. She has no qualms about saying exactly what she thinks, and her reactions to Jackie’s sudden born-again Christian leanings were priceless. Getting dialog to sound natural is not easy, but Satifka does it like a pro. I imagine she’d be very good at script writing!

The only plot point that I had problems with was Em’s memory lapse of what happened to her in college. Her memories come back to her in bits and pieces during the story, but the author didn’t fully explain exactly what happened (or it could be I simply didn’t get it). It was a little frustrating because I feel like it was an important part of the book, as it ties in with the way Em is able to fight the entity during the story's climax. This event also has a lot to do with why Em is in therapy, so I think a clearer explanation would have made my reading experience even better.

But aside from that, Stay Crazy was a blast to read. This is a tale where “crazy” runs amok, not only in the title, but in just about every aspect of the story. If you've ever felt just the slightest bit crazy yourself, then this book is for you.

Big thanks to the publisher for supplying a review copy. This review originally appeared on Books, Bones & Buffy

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Woo-hoo! Congratulations, Erica, on the publication of your first novel!

As you can probably tell, I do have a personal connection to this one. Erica Satifka is a Portland author who was the instructor of a writing class I was taking a year or two ago. We didn't get to hear a lot of her own prose in that particular class, but it was easy to tell she knew what she was talking about. Seeing her name on the cover of Stay Crazy was, therefore, an immediate draw.

One warning, though: This book brings up some extremely sensitive topics (as if you couldn't already tell that just from the title!), and hence this review does as well—so please approach both with caution if you are at all likely to be triggered by discussion of mental illness and its consequences. My desire for you to read this review further may be great, but it is not as important as your need for mental health!

***

So, to begin...

The voices in your head keep telling you things, scary things, things that directly conflict with the reality you are trying so hard to share with others, but those voices are also clever and insidious—they fit all those scary things into a structure that explains just why reality isn't cooperating. You might be crazy; it might be God, or a talk radio host, or even an extradimensional being named Escodex, filling you in on how the world really works, no matter what the people around you say. The scariest thing is that there's no way to tell, not from inside the structure you've built—that's been built for you—and the medications you've been taking to ease the job of faking it just keep making you so fat and slow and gray... so when the voices suggest that you stop taking those pills, that's just what you do, even though that didn't end so well last time. Or the time before that.

So the colors get brighter. Escodex gets easier to hear. And the structure that's been building itself around you, the complex pattern into which everything fits, gets so much easier to comprehend.

Too bad reality still won't cooperate.

But... what if it did?


Emmeline Kalberg—Em—is schizophrenic, diagnosed and undergoing treatment after an incident she doesn't remember now that got her pulled out of Oberlin College and back to live with her mom in Clear Falls, Pennsylvania, a tiny town a few miles south of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River (where Satifka grew up, by the way, and an area with which I have some familiarity myself). Em goes to work at Savertown USA, the big-box everything store that has destroyed the economy of Clear Falls and replaced it with Savertown's own bloated, parasitic, thoroughly trademarked version of the American consumer paradise, using tactics totally unlike those employed by any real-world corporation. Savertown's where Em starts hearing Escodex, an extradimensional being that says it knows exactly why the store's employees have started committing suicide, and what Em should do about it.

Escodex may not be real, but those suicides certainly are. Em does have family and friends in Clear Falls, but they can't help her with this one... ultimately, she must decide whether Escodex is real and, if so, whether she should act on its warnings.

It sounds crazy, but Em might actually be the sanest one at Savertown.


I got a strong Rudy Rucker vibe from Stay Crazy. Rucker's protagonists are often eccentric too, damaged (or at least dented) people who are confronted with bizarre intrusions into their otherwise mundane lives. This is a disturbing book, though, even more so than Rucker's tend to be—Stay Crazy walks the often blurry border between consensus reality and... something else, and it's not at all clear what side Em will end up on. Stay Crazy may be classified as science fiction, but that's only one reading of the text... and not always the most plausible one.


Emmeline Kalberg is a fully rounded character, and her story is a captivating one. I have some indirect experience with this myself—one of my long-time email correspondents is a diagnosed schizophrenic who, I hope, is still taking her meds—and I was extremely impressed with how accurately and respectfully Satifka treated her protagonist, without idealizing Em into saccharine insipidity.

Stay Crazy isn't going to be for everyone, no—it's a little too raw for that—but I've got to say it worked for me.

[Silvia Moreno-Garcia]

They Live but at a Walmart. The premise of a supermarket employee who is the only person that can save Earth from an interdimensional, alien force carries the book through, even if at points the ride gets a bit lumpy. I'm not used to hearing this kind of voice from a writer (everyone is often upper class and having upper class problems), and there's a B-movie glee which shows promise from Satifka for future work. I'll look for more stuff from her in the future.

[Christopher Teague · Rating 4 out of 5]

Emmeline - or 'Em' as she prefers to be known - is a troubled young woman: having suffered a breakdown at College, she lives at home with her mother and bible-thumping sister, working nights at the local supermarket. The job she likes, but her colleagues....

It is while during a standard shift, she is contacted by an Inter-dimensional being - Escodex - who tells her that there is another being slowly sucking the energy out of her colleagues to break into his dimension and destroy it.

Em though is not the most reliable of narrators and as such you're not entirely sure if what she is told is actually happening.

Ostensibly an sf novel, it is mainly a tale of surviving a mental breakdown; of piecing your life together, returning to a hometown when your horizons had been widened.

Despite Em's reliability, she is a great character and the narrative rattles along. Nick Mamatas cites Philip K Dick in his blurb, and I go along with that: there is very much a Dickian vibe running through the story.

Thoroughly recommended.

[Carrie Laben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reminiscent of Charlie Stross's The Laundry Files in style but with more of an eye for character nuance, this book cunningly combines other-dimensional horrors with the far more mundane type. Does a particularly able job of neither romanticizing nor stigmatizing mental illness; main character Em is no plaster saint Sick Girl but a real survivor.

[Xan Rooyen]

Unfortunately, this is DNF for me. I get that the book is going for black humor when it comes to mental illness but it's just not for me.

[Eric Mesa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book definitely sticks to its title. Our protagonist is suffering from a few mental ailments and they play into the story in all sorts of ways. Sometimes it leaves us with an unreliable narrator. Other times it appears to give the narrator the ability to have a greater understanding of the world around her compared to the "normal" folks around her.

Overall, the story is a parody of Walmart and it's "'Murica" ethos. The corporation expects the workers to not only do their jobs, but also to sing the company jingle each morning and display a loyalty for the company out of balance with the job the person is being asked to do. Thrown into this almost cult-like situation is our protagonist who is suffering from, among other things, seeing and hearing things that aren't there. She starts to hear that she needs to do something to save the world and it's not immediately clear to the reader or our protagonist whether or not this is actually happening. Together with this situation is a juxtaposition of churches (although I'm unsure if the author means all churches or smaller, more cult-like churches) and televangelists. I'm not sure if this part of the story is merely to serve as a mirror to the situation going on a the not-Walmart or to serve as a red herring.

The only thing that marred the book for me a little is that sometimes it seemed as though characters abruptly changed conversation context and I wasn't sure if this was
a) supernatural
b) our protagonist seeing something that wasn't there
or
c) something that made sense to our author and their editors, but not to me.

For example, the protagonist will be arguing with her mother and seem to leave the room for just one second and her mother is glued to the TV rather than noticing her reentering the room. Or, at one point, after the mother has insisted throughout the book that she's only worried about our main character, when the protagonist wants to speak to her mother, the mother says it's not a good time because the news is on.

This book is a wild ride, but it's a pretty quick read. Minus the trigger warnings I mention below, I'd recommend just about anyone give it a chance if they want to read something a little off the beaten path. By about a quarter of the way through the book you'll either be interested enough or know it's not for you.

trigger warnings: character with many psychological issues, suicides (attempted and completed)

[Skip · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's not paranoia if they're really out to get you." That old saying isn't entirely accurate in Stay Crazy, because our heroine Em really is paranoid (specifically, paranoid schizophrenic with depressive tendencies). But as strange things happen at the local superstore, it may that something really is out to get her, too.

Em is a young woman dealing with mental illness in rural Pennsylvania. She's had to drop out of college, returning home to live with her mother and younger sister. When she takes a job at the local Savertown USA big-box discount store, she begins to hear a voice coming from another dimension. Strange suicides plague the store's employees, and Em follows the voice's instructions to stem an extra-dimensional incursion and save the day.

At least, that's how Em describes things. Since the story is told entirely from her perspective, and her illness is certainly not totally under control, it's not clear to the reader whether the unnatural extra-dimensional events are really happening or not. It all seems to merge into the world as Em sees it, but is it reality or something warped by her perceptions?

In the end, I don't think it really matters, since Stay Crazy is less a story about extra-dimensional beings and more a window into Em's life as she deals with her illness. Struggling with her medication, dealing with well-meaning but unhelpful doctors, relationship troubles, and many other aspects of living with schizophrenic and depression. All made more difficult by the knowledge that she's in a dead-end job in a small town with little prospect for improvement.

Em is a sarcastic and witty narrator. There's plenty of humor, even when things appear to be pretty bleak. Satifka's characters are nicely developed as the story moves along, though as they're colored through Em's perceptions, few are particularly likable.

Em certainly has her fair share of problems, both self-inflicted and external. The author doesn't end with a happily-ever-after scenario, but things are looking up for her, though plenty of work remains. In the end, I felt like she'd made it through a difficult time and had hope for a better life ahead. Despite all the difficult subject matter, Stay Crazy manages to be a hopeful story.

[Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the story of Emmaline, a twenty-something woman who’s in the process of being discharged from a mental hospital following a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. Em’s doing better. She’s taking her meds every day, and even gets a job at the local discount big-box retailer. Then Em starts hearing a voice that claims it’s a being from another dimension, and it needs Em’s help.

What makes Stay Crazy such an interesting read is the ambiguity about the “hallucinations” that Em experiences. As readers, we know that they are real, but only because we know this is a sci-fi story and in sci-fi stories the person’s visions or hallucinations are always true. But within the narrative itself, Em doesn’t have any proof of that. All she has is her faith in herself and her ability to tell reality from fiction. Seeing Em struggle with that, and watching her trying to determine where exactly the line between sanity and responding to unusual circumstances lies, makes for a really interesting read.

Em is a fun character to follow over the course of the story, as well. She’s smart, sardonic, and . All this makes Stay Crazy a dark, fun, thoughtful piece of sci-fi that could form the centre of a Venn diagram that contained Chuck Palahniuk, Phillip K Dick, and Kevin Smith. It deals with harsh issues surrounding mental illness, and does so in a way that’s both empathetic and exciting at the same time.

[Robyn Bennis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like Borderline for schizophrenia, or perhaps Wonderfalls for trans-dimensional alien invasions, and I loved every page of it. It's the sort of simultaneously beautiful, sad, and funny story that very few authors have the chops to write. Take this line about the protagonist's family history: "When she was eight years old, Em's father had gone out for cigarettes and ice cream and never returned." There's just something so heartbreaking—but also clever and hilarious—in adding those three words to the old cliché about absentee fathers.

(Minor spoilers)
One of the great strengths of this book, and particularly relevant to the theme of schizophrenia, is the foundation of the plot. A voice tells Em that the entire world is in danger and only she can save it. That's strong call to adventure if there ever was one, but how can she know that it's real? Hearing voices is a common symptom of schizophrenia, after all, and the author is quite happy to leave the matter as uncertain for the reader as it is for the protagonist through most of the book.
(End spoilers)

To sum up: this is one of those rare books that strikes the perfect balance between cynical absurdity and heartfelt sincerity. You're doing yourself a disservice if you miss out on it.

[Ry Herman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think this book intended to explore the concept of a paranoid schizophrenic who is contacted by a genuine extradimensional entity. How can someone who can't trust her own senses distinguish between what is real and what isn't? How can you believe in something that seems exactly like one of your own delusions? In the end, could it all have been a hallucination after all?

It's an interesting concept, but it's not handled perfectly here. The book is at its best when the main character goes off her meds and drifts from reality, which is depicted well, but other than that it doesn't hold up very well. The storyline is vague and the characterization is sometimes inconsistent (why does Roger suddenly change his mind about Escodex? There's no explanation whatsoever.) And it doesn't help that the protagonist is a terrible person with almost no redeeming qualities. That made it hard to root for her, frankly.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Em starts working at a big box store after leaving a mental hospital in an effort to have something resembling a normal life. But then she starts hearing voice in a box of frozen chicken nuggets.

Em is a complicated character. She sometimes voices her distaste for her small town and the co-workers at the local big box store. But at other times she finds the beauty in them. Because she has schizophrenia, she struggles throughout the story wondering whether the voice she hears is real or imaginary, and when she questioned herself, it left me feeling distraught and on edge because, like Em, I didn't know if what she was experiencing was real or imaginary.

Stay Crazy is a book that will make you think, and Em is a character that will stay with you long after you put it down.

[Marissa · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF p. ~75. No patience for using Judaism as background noise, esp when author doesn't seem to have any respect for how atheist Jews would react to the world. (Reminder that Judaism is not just Xtianity 1.0 or lite.)

If that's not an issue for you, I also quit at the staccato time hops, the unreliable and unlikable narrator (which would be fine, but she's also just flat and uninteresting as a character), and the boyfriend of convenience. Oh, and the weirdness of being forced to go to Oberlin then also forced in to abandoning her creativity because career/respectability/whatever. There are easier and less intentionally weird liberal arts schools all across the Midwest to attend that fit that idea, going to Oberlin to become boring is bananas.

[Phillip M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Life can be get very difficult for Em, Erica L. Satifka’s “Stay Crazy” protagonist, but I couldn’t help rooting for her. I was not sure how much of Em’s situation is real and how much is imagined and right up through the climax I found myself still wondering. In spite of this, though, I was pulling for Em to succeed. To her credit, Satifka has a very clear and easy writing style that quickly gets to the point. This direct approach gives Em a very infectious personality, especially when contrasted with those around her. I definitely recommend this book for anyone looking for something out of the ordinary.
Phillip M. Johns

[Josh English · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stay Crazy is a good alien invasion story relying on alternate realities and hierarchical planes of existence for both the threat and the solution to the threat. Em is one of the few that can save the world, and being young and unsure of herself, must grow up fast to fulfill the task given her. That her task is to save the world (and the next) is just another bit of pressure on her life.

Either that, or the fact that she is a schizophrenic depressive suffering from illusions and risks being a danger to society.

It's a fun read.

[Marie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yay! I can finish a book during the quarantine!

One of the most gutsy unreliable narrator projects. A schizophrenic actually receives signals from another dimension, and the fate of the world relies on her! How will she tell the real from the super-real?

I loved the setting, and the incidental characters and the sarcasm. It really captured that feeling of winter never f'n ending that is as true of my Midwest upbringing as it is in the Appalachia of the story.

[Wendy · Rating 3 out of 5]

My favorite part of this book was the voice of the main character. I liked her prickly, damaged, loving heart and her biting commentary. The weird elements were integrated--they matched the story and didn't feel forced. I have a soft spot for narratives that satirize and skewer corporate nonsense and this one does a fine job of it.

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked this book quite a bit; I always seem to enjoy stories told by an unreliable narrator, and this was no exception! There are a couple scenes when the character suffers from psychotic hallucinations that made me super uneasy while reading them. Enjoyed the main character's sarcasm and overall aloofness to their situation.

[Terry Madden · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erica Satifka, a British Fantasy Award nominee, has produced a laugh-out-loud romp through the life of a schizophrenic who is battling unseen evil from her Walmart-like workplace. This is entertainment at its best with a touch of social commentary that fills out its five stars. I highly recommend it.

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

a fun, breezy read that balances its dark turns with the comic absurdity of life in that strange nexus where extra-dimensional forces and rollback prices mix. Satifka won't weigh you down with words, but she will keep you guessing at what was real long after the last page.

[Charlie Eskew · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was wonderful, it did a great job of keeping you guessing as to what was really afoot and engaged me entirely. The protagonist has a hilarious but also frustrated voice; frustrated with the world around her, with the mundane and misonceptions of her mental illness.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not too deep but very entertaining.

[Trish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting look into what a schizophrenic might experience.