Where Did You Sleep Last Night

Starred review from June 20, 2016
Crosbie (Paul’s Case) has written a remarkable love story between a lonely teenager and the deceased singer Kurt Cobain. Evelyn Gray, neglected by her alcoholic mother and terrorized by kids at her school in the small town of Carnation, Wash., develops an idolatrous love for the Nirvana singer, who died before she was born, writing him letters and obsessively confiding in his poster above her bed. After a drug overdose, she wakes to find Cobain, now reincarnated and renamed Celine Black, lying in the hospital bed next to hers, with only fragmentary memories of his past life. The couple, recognizing similar passions in each other, escape from the hospital and run away to become musicians, forming their own bands. But soon their celebrity seems only to fuel their passionate jealousies and urgent love, and they begin to rely on heroin more and more to cope with these pressures, until their excessive lifestyle spins into violence. The surreal stream of-consciousness Crosbie adopts to describe their drug highs feels remarkably authentic. By turns funny and tragic, fan fiction and elegy, this is a must-read for Nirvana fans. Named for the song popularized by Lead Belly, which Cobain sang in one of his final performances, the novel is just as moving and raw. Agent: Carolyn Forde, Westwood Creative Artists.

September 1, 2016
Fangirling goes rogue in Canadian writer, critic, and poet Crosbie's intoxicatingly bizarre account of 18-year-old Evelyn Gray, whose intense love for Kurt Cobain brings the deceased Nirvana front man back to life. As Evelyn lies in the hospital, comatose after a failed suicide attempt, Cobain awakens in the neighboring bed as Celine Black, leaving a shared opiate dream with Evelyn to pursue her in real life. What follows is a tempestuous and torrid affair, marked by violent sex and drugs, tenderness and jealousy, filth and glamor, music and, eventually, murderfated love at its best. The real star of the book is Crosbie's imaginative, visceral writing, which mirrors the drug-riddled consciousness of Evelyn and Celine, who both narrate sections of the novel. Interestingly, Celine has no concrete memories of his previous life as Cobain, though parallels are immediately evident and relics of Cobain's life creep into the plot. More an experience than a narrative, this is a hallucinatory, ragged read that exists at the intersection of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1996) and Caitlin Moran's How to Build a Girl (2014).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)