mURdEr cLuB cANDy

Twelve year old Liss watches her fifty two year old father fall into orbit around Candy, the twenty year old bartender at Sharks—the lakeside bar where they eat Mexican Benedict on Sunday mornings, where a tiny shark named SHARK! lives in a cage behind the counter, and where Liss observes everything with the deadpan precision of a child who has long understood that adults are simply children with better excuses—a novel of "modo aumentado," the heightened state people enter when they want something badly enough, and what one very watchful twelve year old decides to do about it. Content warnings: sexual content, age gap relationship, violence, strong language, racial language, drug and alcohol use. "I wish I hadn't had to kill Candy. I wish we hadn't lost SHARK! Pila got him back, but he didn't live for very long. Some things are unavoidable."

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