A 700-page collection of Amazon reviews by the late ringmaster of a literary troupe

Kevin Killian’s literary universe is a carnival of knowledge — equally carnal and bookish. His wife, writer Dodie Bellamy, wrote in 2000 that his droves of sexual partners “fell in the four-digit range.” Most, nearly all, were men, whose anatomies and erotic proclivities Killian blew up to often cartoonish proportions in fiction, essays, plays, reviews and poems, for example in a scene from the 2001 short story “White Rose,” in which an escaped convict uses a gun to heat up his tryst with a random hookup.

(Semiotext(e))

Killian’s work isn’t all steamy overblown fantasy, though. The author, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 66, was also astoundingly erudite, even among his heady artistic milieu in pre-tech San Francisco. His stylish critical voice could delve into the forgotten poets of the Civil War as easily as it swooned for queer diva Kylie Minogue or a beloved constellation of midcentury Hollywood stars — Doris Day, Loretta Young and others.

Like so many precocious queer children who followed the breadcrumb trail of gay culture in the postwar years, Killian saw high and low as flip sides of the same novelty coin. His intellectual voraciousness both befit the internet age and felt vintage, not unlike his 1970s-bred relationship with promiscuity: He wanted to immerse himself in every sensation and object, art or kitsch, that the United States coughed up during the freest decades of its imperial century.

Killian was known for making friends with writers of every generation, building a vast web of contacts and correspondents. His writing feels like a carnival because all are invited, a quality that shines in a new posthumous collection, “Selected Amazon Reviews,” picked by editors Hedi El Kholti and Robert Dewhurst from the glut of criticism Killian posted on the titular website between 2004 and his death. This 700-page selection of the more than 1 million words Killian churned out within the belly of an ever-growing corporate beast covers products ranging from 200 mg of Advil and multipurpose duct tape to Sheila Heti’s novel “Motherhood.”

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, as in a 2005 review of “The Sunshine on My Face: A Read-Aloud Book for Memory-Challenged Adults,” when Killian brings the volume in question to what he whimsically terms a “local elder hostel” and reads to an octogenarian who tells the author about his D-Day experiences on Omaha Beach:

“Some residents said that this man had not spoken aloud in years, and one said this was the first time anyone even knew that my new friend was an American. He spoke so little that, based on his name, many had thought he was a Frenchman marooned in this country by dementia.”

Killian took permission from the behemoth of Amazon to reach past the bounds of his own literary sphere. And, relatedly, he shirked strictures of style that critics often internalize. 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. For each of these reviews, Killian’s readers might be anyone — and so he can be anyone, too.

The book becomes a lumbering postmodern megatext that seemingly fits the whole Earth between its covers, à la “Madame Bovary” or “Infinite Jest.” Yet Killian’s accomplishment is too queer, too epigrammatic and too welcome to the reader who grazes and engages piecemeal over the course of years to ever get such credit. “Selected Amazon Reviews” might be the best bathroom reader ever; it has no lofty airs and doesn’t require them.

One of the tome’s most powerful motifs is how Killian, during the mid-aughts, mourns dead celebrities, from Janet Leigh to Rodney Dangerfield, a forward-thinking take on ways the internet would increasingly bind people together by transforming collective grief into a reliably global phenomenon. Killian was writing past the riven spirits of AIDS’ most lethal period, which had marked his earlier output, and into an optimism that feels appropriately unhinged. How else to indulge hope in the 21st century? 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.

Daniel Felsenthal is a fiction writer, poet, critic and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic and other publications.