Press for Chemical Pink

Articles:

Malibu Surfside News
Paper Magazine

Reviews:

“This week my own agent, Joni Evans, sent me a new novel entitled Chemical Pink, written by a female bodybuilder named Katie Arnoldi of Venice, California. It is coming any minute from Forge Press and is one of the most unusual pieces of fiction I’ve ever seen. I read it non-stop in 4 ½ hours; couldn’t put it down. Comic and horrifying, sadistic and hilarious, tragic and funny all at the same time. What an X-rated movie this would make with somebody like John Malkovich as the creepy protagonist who loves women tormenting their muscles into androgynous shapes. I never read anything quite like this. It’s as if the Marquis de Sade got loose again with his funny bone banging at our front door.”
Liz Smith, New York Post

“In this century, in which narcissism is not merely encouraged but reigns supreme, the quest for female body perfection has, you might say, reached gargantuan proportions. What 10 years ago passed for delightfully svelte now seems positively scrawny…. There is something tantalizingly pagan about it: women as goddesses, big, beefy unconquerables, creatures never to be captured or tamed. But are they monstrous or fabulous? Are massive muscles sexually attractive, or merely a vain embarrassment of riches? For all that starving and pumping, surely there must be a price to pay.

Katie Arnoldi is a former Southern California bodybuilding champion, whose novel, Chemical Pink, explores the secret world of bodybuilding through the eyes of a young woman and her Svengali-like torturer and promoter. A Pygmalion tale in which lewd sex and a pharmacy of muscle-enhancing drugs replace afternoon tea and diction, it has just been sold to Hollywood, to New Line Cinema.”
Talk Magazine

“Tired of well-crafted novel about sensitive folk struggling with life, loss, grief? Ready for something that has its pervert monitor cranked to super hot? Welcome to the syringe-wielding bodybuilders of Chemical Pink by Katie Arnoldi…. Arnoldi has penned one of the more compelling books of the season. As a bodybuilder herself, as she points out in the author’s note, she understands the competitors and knows of the sport’s dark danger: steroid use (Arnoldi says she was never at that level). Chemical Pink details what happens to women’s bodies when they start taking big-league hormones…[and] explains how people become obsessed with shaping their bodies to their own Herculean images. Although it can become twisted and sick, there is still an element of creativity, artistry and skill in this strange world of physical display. It’s body as artistic canvas.”
USA Today

“The real allure of the book is…the fact that lives like those described can be found any day at the place we assume to be the most health-conscious spot on Earth: the gym. Arnoldi, a former bodybuilder, says she wrote what she knew. And it is clear from her pages—which are peppered with precise information about specific drugs and diets, right down to the number of cc’s injected and the number of ounces to eat—that she had on-scene knowledge…. Although people who read the book cannot imagine that such weirdness and fatal obsessions really exist, Arnoldi can prove (and produce others who confirm) that they do.”
Los Angeles Times

“”[Arnoldi] has graphically depicted an interesting subculture of America…. This is a book you can’t put down because it sticks to your hands. It’s not that you like it — pant, pant. You need it.””
The Arizona Daily Star

“…a page-turner. In the cruel, sweltering world of the gymnasium, the bodybuilder’s physique symbolizes strength and independence, but in the Worthington mansion Aurora is subjected to innumerable indignities, each one topping the last…. Chemical Pink is much more than just a catalog of sexual fetishes and insulin doses. It’s a serious investigation of ambition and its costs in a sport that simultaneously empowers women and reduces them to barely living statues.”
Village Voice Literary Supplement

“Chemical Pink is a compelling novel that explores a dark and troubling world. I was fascinated—and occasionally repelled—by this subculture that Arnoldi so skillfully leads us into. She is a talented writer with a sharp, distinctive voice.”
Carrie Fisher

“It is difficult these days to shock and beguile with a kind of aggressive innocence, but Miss Arnoldi has in this book. It is disturbingly funny and utterly unflinching.”
Susanna Moore, author of IN THE CUT

“Chemical Pink is a dazzling first novel—entirely original, dizzyingly controlled, all ice-cool momentum on the surface and all shock below.”
Joan Didion

“Surfer Katie Arnoldi takes the beach of the lit scene with Chemical Pink, a modern gothic comedy of obsession, in which a female bodybuilder submits to the twisted whims of a rich eccentric who wants to shape her future, literally.”
Vanity Fair

“Amazing…. Her portrait of Charles is etched in such a way that if there was someone she wanted to avenge, she has used ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ to perfection.”
Beverly Hills Courier

“Dazzlingly disturbing… Chemical Pink is one of the most original (and pleasantly perverted) reads in a long, long time.”
Jack Martin, Beverly Hills 213