Spreadeagle by Kevin Killian
Kevin Killian is one of America’s great eccentrics, a stylist with so much pizazz that perhaps it’s inevitable he has been punished with under-recognition. His ongoing joke is that his narrators are never really dumb, even when they aren’t exactly smart, and it is in this restless ambiguity, the characters' unintentional savviness, that we discover the beautiful fact that their naiveté is in fact rooted not in ironic posturing but in an openness to the world that most of us lack.
Kevin Killian is one of America’s great eccentrics, a stylist with so much pizazz that perhaps it's inevitable he has been punished with under-recognition. His sentences are suffused with a folksiness that reminds one of the great southern writers, though his books are usually set in the California he has called home for the past several decades. In his latest novel, Spreadeagle, one of his characters relays the following: “‘Dogs and cats got two things in common,’ my mother used to say, ‘and one of them ain’t fit to mention.’ That always made me feel uncomfortable. I didn’t even know what the