“An extremely engaging combo of sex, melancholy and killer one-liners—The Bird Room is a beautiful Chinese puzzle of a novel.” - Toby Litt, author of Hospital and Ghost Story
“An astonishingly good first novel. I was gripped from the first page.” - M.J. Hyland, author of Carry Me Down
“Either disturbingly brilliant or brilliantly disturbing. Whichever, I loved it.” - Steven Hall, author of The Raw Shark Texts
“The Bird Room is amazing. Beautiful, laconic, and chockablock with uneasy sex—like having a threesome with your girlfriend and Richard Brautigan.” - Richard Milward, author of Apples and Ten Storey Love Song
“A strangely merry look at the agony of true love.” - Dazed & Confused
“A disturbing and uncomfortably bleak comedy full of existential angst, emotional self-destruction, and a lot of deviant and frequently depressing sex....a postmodern take of the traditional love-triangle tale, with a bit of sadomasochism and paranoia thrown in.” - The Herald (Scotland)
“Killen creates something memorable out of his everyday ingredients. Clever time shifts keep the reader on their toes. . . . [with] darkly funny observations about contemporary urban life his spare, powerful prose brilliantly captures the loneliness of cities and the agonies of love.” - The London Paper
“A postmodern world of troubled comic virtuality. . . . The Bird Room x-rays the souls of young people.” - The Guardian
“Chris Killen’s writing surprised me sometimes and made me think ‘that is funny’ sometimes and I never felt bad reading it because I knew (by reading the sentences) that he had worked hard on being sincere, concise, and interesting.” - Tao Lin, author of Eeeee Eee Eeee and Bed
“Killen has taken a rough stone and polished it into a gem. A book that succeeds in turning daily banality into a thing of great beauty.” - Ewan Morrison, author of The Last Book You Read and Swung
“A darkly stylish black comedy of sexual manners. . . . His odd, downbeat characters engage in the kind of sex that makes you feel as if your soul needs a wash. . . . Taut, sharp prose . . . that gives an edgy, sometimes creepy, and very contemporary sense of beauty to the everyday and banal.” - Metro London
“Killen has fun playing with identities in a manner that brings to mind David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive.” - The Sunday Herald (UK)
“Those who seek something unique . . . will delight in this adroit, snappy debut, a dark and beguiling meditation on the weight of being, conveying the notion of the trapped individual riveted to an existence that makes no sense. . . . so fresh it practically pings with energy. . . . The fragmentary make-up of The Bird Room is seamlessly woven into a perfectly formed whole that fizzes with deadpan wit and cutting one-liners. . . . The Bird Room, a novel of misguided youth, is an exciting debut from a novelist already beginning to display maturity beyond his years.” - Independent