Review of Krackle's Last Movie by Chelsea Sutton

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In elementary school, one of the greatest joys was sifting through the library to find books about magicians, monsters, detectives, freeze rays, and diners: stories to laugh about during recess and to imagine on the big screen before bed. Krackle’s Last Movie by Chelsea Sutton satiates the childhood desire for bigness on the page. She invites readers to slow down and indulge youthfully in a sampling of mythologies, discoveries, landscapes, and personalities. The novella is told through bite-sized clips that serve as the building blocks of a documentary. Each clip is cinematic, briny, probing, and wholly imaginative. 

The story is pulled by unearthly wonder and a core of mystery. Opening the novella, the narrator, Harper, shares that her mentor Minerva Krackle has disappeared and the responsibility to complete Krackle’s documentary has fallen on her shoulders. The documentary examines a phenomenon of this world called “beastification” in which people become monsters. Harper sifts through the existing clips of the documentary to find clues that may provide insight into Krackle’s disappearance, and through exploring these clips, Harper contends with her own identity. She describes the way that she sees the world—the colors that only she can see and that she fondly names. By playing with the supernatural elements in the book, Sutton approaches aroma, taste, and texture with such style that they both ground and heighten the events of the documentary. This atmosphere is achieved through unlikely and zingy combinations of sensory details: cigarettes that smell like chlorine, ice cubes that taste like cinnamon melting in fresh coffee, the scent of the desert “like human skin drying in a dusty barn,” and bandages covered in rhinestones.

Among these sensory landscapes, the cast of the book shimmer with vulnerability and wit. When Krackle interviews a mummy girl, a teenage vampire, a pair of mermaid upstairs neighbors, a sea monster who owns a hardware store, and a Frankenstein casino girl, she coaxes to the surface each of their experiences becoming unfamiliar to themselves. In one interview, a werewolf wearing a vintage Star Trek t-shirt explains how foreign his own personhood feels:

“‘So when I change it’s like I’m watching my arm strangle people and punch through walls and cause all this damage and I can’t do anything about it. And I know that’s not me. And sometimes it maybe paints a pretty picture or mixes a drink and is real nice, but I know that’s not me either. All I can do is watch.” 

‘So that’s being a werewolf?’ asks Krackle.

‘That’s being anything,’ says John the scraggly man. ‘That’s being anything.’”

Through conversations like these, the reader is charmed by a relatability to monster characters that would otherwise be tricky to relate to. When characters in the novella are “beastified,” they struggle to understand themselves and the transformations they have undergone, often feeling that they have been reduced to witnesses of their own lives. In many ways, these “beastifications” are a parody of the more mundane transformations that everyday people experience and struggle with from day to day, year to year, and decade to decade. 

Dealing with unfamiliarity and change, time swirls throughout the book as its own character; visible, known deeply, and still somehow gauzy, never fully within grasp. Krackle always spells “Time” with a capital T, and many of the characters throughout the book wish to tame time somehow, to return to who they once were or to delay who they will be. The way The Great Merlan describes it: “‘Time is shapeless. Time cannot be traveled or created. It can simply be rearranged.”

Sutton uses a light hand to maintain an undercurrent of relief and hope throughout the book, despite its bounciness, suspense, weaving clues, intuitive characters, and interrogation of the slipperiness of time. Although time is depicted to be untamable and shapeless, the book leaves the reader with an optimism that they will feel complete even when time seems to fracture and slip away, that they will be proud of both what has been and what will be, and, most of all, that they will be seen.

Book Review by Hana Wisnuardi

Hana Wisnuardi is a writer from Dallas, Texas pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Arkansas. Her creative work has been published in Literary Veganism, the tiny journal, and Terrain.org. She has a cat named Squid, a Giant Microbe collection, and a yearning to go tidepooling. 

Krackle's Last Movie by Chelsea Sutton is out now through Split/Lip Press

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