His reviews, usually five stars, are often exaggeratedly gushing, even melodramatic, but they are not mere parodies .... Genuinely illuminating ... Elaborate, protracted critiques ... An oblique yet insightful commentary about modern life ... Killian’s reviews are brimming with genuine pleasure, and also a wonderment and ardor for the great variety of stuff on the Web site ... Killian’s voice [is] palpably alive and joyfully haunting Amazon’s servers.
His writing feels like a carnival because all are invited, a quality that shines in a new posthumous collection ... His opus comprises an unmatched, bravura feat of 21st century criticism. We expect these reviews to be funny, but so often they hold out the possibility of comedy only to shake free our emotions ... Killian’s gymnastic voice can twist into lust, satire or disarming generosity. The irony of writing from within the bowels of the über-corporation is that there is no expectation for consistency, no company line specific enough to constrain a writer’s imagination, and no audience sensibility to acknowledge ... These queer, brief pieces are the delicious fruits of a career spent wading through America’s gleaming cultural waste and finding other beating hearts and curious minds among the wreckage.
Like a punk collective taking over an abandoned building to stage performance art, Killian surreptitiously commandeered a space built by a commercial entity for the purpose of luring the public to willingly perform free labor ... Learned, often laugh-out-loud funny, frequently moving, guilelessly enthusiastic and intellectually generous ... He subverted the essentially cynical egotism of capitalism and reasserted art as, always and ever, communal ... In mapping its own marvelously peculiar terrain, Killian’s work is proof just how deeply fearlessness matters. I’m giving Selected Amazon Reviews five stars. It’s the most they let you give.
