Who Made Stevie Crye?

by Michael Lawson Bishop

Book Overview

Mary Stevenson Crye, a recently widowed young mother known as Stevie to her family and friends, lives in a small Georgia community with her two children and a balky PDE Exceleriter. As a free-lance... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870540998
• ISBN13: 9780870540998
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Arkham House Publishers
• Length: 309 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Meta-fiction and parody: a horror novel

Bishop takes us for a wild ride in this book. Combining meta-fiction (making the text of the book self-reference itself) with outrageous parody of the horror genre (it gets awesomelly surreal!), he comes out with an absurdist comedy that manages to be scary at the same time.The story in few words: Writer and recent widow Stevie Crye's electric typewriter breaks up, leaving her without the tool of her trade. She gets her machine fixed by a creepy thecnician, and she gets an unexpected extra oomph when the typewriter begins typing by itself. At first, the machine transcripts Stevie's nightmares. Gradually, it CONSTRUCTS her nightmares, and provides her with hallucinations that taint her waking hours. (Or are the hallucinations the real thing?) When Stevie reads these compositions, they are the chapters of the book, verbatim.If you read the Animal Man comics during Grant Morrison's run, you might have an idea of what to expect on the matter of trippiness. If you didn't, suffice it to say that you may experience the same confussion as Stevie when Bishop reminds you that all you're reading is just fiction, and yet the ficticious characters fight to show their free will within the constraints of plot.