As weird and wild and beautiful and filthy as Venice Beach itself, Jessamyn Violet's new novel, Venice Peach, has everything I want in books about Los Angeles: Beautiful imagery, characters that are simultaneously totally outlandish and exactly like people you've met in real life, reverently excoriating takes on both Hollywood and the music industry, and so, so much sex.
The novel opens and closes with a tone-setting, world-building manifesto of sorts, told from the point of view of Ellie Delight, a self-aware reprogrammed sex-bot turned psychic ringmaster of the Venice Peach Underground Freak Circus, where weirdos and misfits of all kinds gather for some good, old-fashioned analog fun in an America that has been crippled by oppressive technology and the ultra-destructive reign of one “President Fuckwad” (a name so elegantly blunt that it immediately made me laugh out loud), whose aggressively inept leadership thrust our once-fair nation into a combination depression/civil war.
Venice Peach manages to feel simultaneously rooted in the past — it could rest comfortably alongside the 1980’s-set punk rock fantasia of Francesca Lia Block’s iconic Weetzie Bat books — while keeping its eyes on a future that feels so inevitable it’s practically here already. (If we’re doomed to live in a world of robot Presidents and armed police drones, all I ask is that we also get the holographic dresses and glow pumps.)
Violet shifts through multiple POVs effortlessly, telling the story of the seaside speakeasy circus and the superdoom portal that consumes it, through the eyes (and loins) of seven different characters, plus Ellie Delight — a clever device that keeps the pages turning.
And, oh, the sex.
In the LA of Venice Peach, hardly anyone believes in monogamy, or even relationships, but everyone is sex-obsessed, from the affable stoner who drives the party bus to the cutest little telepathic canal creature. And just when you think, “This book is sorta horny, but not that horny…” the action climaxes (natch!) with one of the most bizarre, surprisingly hot, and oddly sweet threesomes ever committed to print.
This is the kind of book that pretends like it wants nothing more than to give you a good time, but then by the end you find yourself super inspired and even kinda weepy, drunk on love for all that is strange and good and real in this world, and in this city. In the words of Ellie Delight, “This is how it feels before you break. In a good way.” It’s hard to think of a better tagline for America in 2025 — and it’s impossible to imagine a more loving valentine to a city too often unfairly maligned.
If you don't live here already, it'll make you want to pack up and move -- and that's despite the fact that it's set in what is basically a not-too-distant dystopian future. If we are, in fact, teetering on the edge of a fascist/climate crisis/AI apocalypse, there's nowhere else I'd rather be than in the Venice Beach of Jessamyn Violet's playfully prescient Venice Peach.
