RaveLos Angeles Review of BooksTogether, Fascination is sometimes scattered, sometimes frustrating, but ultimately reads as historically important and textually delightful. It’s easy to see why people love Kevin Killian so much ... Killian’s is a considerable associative impulse ... Killian’s passage through the lapidary present into fantasy and finally self-apperception offers the reader something deeper than mere ex-indictment. It’s a mimesis of the process of recovery: after the goosebumps comes a great deal of imaginative labor and an ultimate arrival at a more-or-less functional adulthood, one cognizant of...but not defined by...the pains of the past. There’s also a sly action on the epiphanic—a queering of the old-narrative approach to self-discovery ... the epiphany arrives not in a single unitary story but over the course of decades, continents; the finally realized self isn’t an alarming instability but a scarred and laborious serenity ... Characteristic, too, is the sudden change of tone in the prose. Killian’s sentences lope along in flat descriptives for whole paragraphs, whole pages, before tightening into arresting verbal images ... \'Kevin Killian\' as both a human being and a set of textual strategies is still visibly under construction in these pages, partly assembled by the dramatized dalliances but also continuing to assemble himself in the process of writing ... The case for Fascination, then, is a case for a kind of communal or generational Künstlerroman—a story, to borrow from the Gertrude Stein everyone was reading, about how Americans are made.
