RaveThe BelieverIn his new triad of memoirs, Kevin Killian replaces the epiphanic mode of storytelling with something less knowable—a gorgeous turbulence, rather than some dramatic self-discovery. As with Killian’s other writing, informed by the poetics of \'New Narrative,\' the narrator in Fascination is both uncannily like its author, and someone curiously, entirely, fabulated ... Killian not only disturbs how personalities, in fiction, can be reassembled, but also the ways in which they can be remembered ... the stories in this collection come together as counterfeited pastiche, or as montage. Autobiography is not, in Killian’s prose, a simple telling, but is rather a framework that can be promiscuously, repeatedly retooled ... with Fascination, we get a set of stories that in their digressiveness are, otherwise told straight: historical specificity, here, comes as a process of wandering, of not knowing what’s in front of one’s own eyes, not deciding to move forward but getting there anyway ... The radicality, and the necessity of Killian’s Fascination comes from its willingness to yoke those two, reality and the book, together.
