Who Made Stevie Crye? — Michael Bishop

Mary Stevenson Crye, a widowed young mother known as Stevie to family and friends, lives in a small Georgia town with her two children and a balky PDE Exceleriter. As a free-lance writer, she depends upon this device, once a state-of-the-art variety of typewriter, to generate income for her little clan. When the PDE Exceleriter goes noisily on the fritz, and a mess of things go wrong as a result-from her meeting with a weird young typewriter repairman named Seaton Benecke and Seaton's creepy pet, a monkey named 'Crets . . . to her repaired machine's tendency to type segments of her everyday life as she either lives or hallucinates it . . . to- -well, just know that the horror of Stevie's husband's death from cancer, along with her concern for the sexual angst of her son Teddy and her fight to solve her problems via her literary calling, leads her not only to the doorstep of the fortuneteller, Sister Celestial, but also into even scarier descents into Southern Gothic darkness. A novel of the American south, a tender and biting parody of 20th-century horror novels, and a gripping account of one woman's battle to save her sanity, Who Made Stevie Crye? will unleash a host of reactions from any reader-from laughter to disquiet to outrage to incredulity. In print again on the 30th anniversary of its original publication, this rare novel awaits new readers to frighten, bemuse, scandalize, and delight.