Lurkers

Praise for Lurkers “How is Lurkers simultaneously hilarious and horrifying? I’ll tell you how: PURE GENIUS. Sandi Tan populates Santa Claus Lane, her leafy corner of suburban LA, with such viscerally original characters that I found myself laughing at their outrageousness while nodding at their familiar humanity. Every page of this wildly original book is a surprise and a delight.” —Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians “Completely original and unpredictable . . . Sandi Tan is one of the freshest voices out there.” —The Today Show “Riveting storytelling opens a portal into the private lives of a diverse and remarkable cast of characters.” —Time “Lurkers affirms Tan as a deft and impressively rangy storyteller with an unfettered imagination, eager to flay open the more disturbing aspects of human nature and suffering . . . Part of the pleasure of reading Lurkers is the queasiness of parsing the darkly comic from the just plain dark.” —GQ “The themes that commonly occupy [Tan's] work remain consistent: the celebration of adolescence as a time of bold, uninhibited experimentation; the desire to shrink from the 9-to-5 world in favor of the land of dreams, and the delights of sui generisself-creation . . . Tan scans America with the eye of someone who is inside the fold enough to speak its language, but can also pick apart a culture from the outside.”  —The Nation “Darkly funny.” —Woman's Day “Sandi Tan’s Lurkers is an acid-etched American Beauty for our current moment. But rather than suburban white male dread, Lurkers excavates the deeper mysteries and dark humor of female desire and a cultural and existential desperation so heavy it takes both tragedy and catastrophe to root it loose. A sneaky marvel of a novel and not to be missed.” —Megan Abbott, bestselling author of Give Me Your Hand “The sheer chaotic energy of Lurkers belies a considerable degree of control and structure . . . Yet Lurkers has a surprisingly endearing ending you wish you could see more of. This slice of sunshine noir possesses its own demented charm.” —The Straits Times “Lurkers shifts kaleidoscopically between the residents of Santa Claus Lane . . . This narrative rotation allows the reader to see all characters from all vantage points—like peering out of an open window onto the street, blessed with total omniscience.” —Hazlitt “Spanning generations living on the Los Angeles street of Santa Claus Lane, Lurkers interweaves the closed-off lives of neighbors to braid a rich tapestry of place and how that becomes unwittingly shaped and colored by those around us.” —Thrillist  “These characters propel the narrative forward and are simultaneously repulsive and fascinating . . . They are layered, well-observed, and often flawed, but always in ways that are wince-inducingly recognizable.” —PopMatters  “The book unfolds as a series of episodic character studies among the denizens of Santa Claus Lane, an idyllic-seeming suburban neighborhood in Los Angeles. The eclectic cast of characters and Tan’s vivid-yet-unassuming style play like a magic trick, and the way the characters’ lives eventually come together is all the more poignant for its unexpectedness.” —The Arts Fuse “Lurkers is a heartbreaking delight. The intricately woven stories and characters here are funny and horrifying, weird and wise. I to