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The Kills #4
The Hit: The Kills 4
A man is found in the desert, burned beyond all recognition.Thomas Berens thinks this is the man he's been hunting.The last survivor.The Hit is book four of The Kills.The Kills is an epic novel of crime and conspiracy told in four books.It begins with a man on the run and ends with a burned body.Author Richard House has created audio and video content that takes you beyond the boundaries of the book and into the characters' lives outside its pages. This is the standard edition of the ebook, which contains links to this work on www.thekills.co.uk.To discover more about Richard House, The Hit or The Kills, go to www.thekills.co.uk.
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 20, 2013
About the author
Richard House
45 books18 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author with this name in the Goodreads database.
Richard House is an author, film maker, artist and university lecturer. As well as the digital-first novel The Kills, he has written two previous novels (Bruiser and Uninvited), which were published by Serpent’s Tail in the 1990s. He is a member of the Chicago-based collaborative Haha. He is the editor of a digital magazine, Fatboy Review: www.fatboyreview.net
Born in Cyprus, Richard House is an artist and writer. His first novel, Bruiser, was short-listed for the Ferro Grumley Gay Fiction Award in the USA. The Kills has been longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize. He currently teaches at Birmingham University, UK.
Richard House is an author, film maker, artist and university lecturer. As well as the digital-first novel The Kills, he has written two previous novels (Bruiser and Uninvited), which were published by Serpent’s Tail in the 1990s. He is a member of the Chicago-based collaborative Haha. He is the editor of a digital magazine, Fatboy Review: www.fatboyreview.net
Born in Cyprus, Richard House is an artist and writer. His first novel, Bruiser, was short-listed for the Ferro Grumley Gay Fiction Award in the USA. The Kills has been longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize. He currently teaches at Birmingham University, UK.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 10, 2018
Maybe brought all the books together kind of? Glad to be done the series.
August 22, 2013
In Don DeLillo’s classic 1988 novel Libra, a fictionalized Lee Harvey Oswald repeatedly insists that “There is a world inside the world.” Emphasizing his belief that buried beneath the surface of the visible, lurking just out of sight, is some second layer of complex hidden truths that are driven by incomprehensible machinations, this succinct statement compactly echoes the fear of conspiracy theorists and paranoid delusionists the world over.
Oh, there’s a world inside the fucking world alright, and Richard House is more than adequately equipped to show it to you. In fact, the further I progressed in my reading of his Booker nominated epic The Kills, the more I became convinced that it’s the best novel Don DeLillo never got around to writing. In the 1980s DeLillo’s The Names (bizarre language cults), White Noise (an airborne toxic event) and Libra (the Kennedy assassination) all intelligently toyed with seemingly good people that became caught up in highly amplified circumstances involving treacherous schemes and suspicious dealings. The Kills follows in these footsteps, and while House’s dialog might not be nearly as opaque as DeLillo’s, his no-nonsense approach to fast-paced, straight-forward storytelling helps him to achieve the same essential results. Even in this final installment of a four book series, the messages “Trust No One” and “Believe Nothing” burst through as loud and as clear as ever.
READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/the-h...
Oh, there’s a world inside the fucking world alright, and Richard House is more than adequately equipped to show it to you. In fact, the further I progressed in my reading of his Booker nominated epic The Kills, the more I became convinced that it’s the best novel Don DeLillo never got around to writing. In the 1980s DeLillo’s The Names (bizarre language cults), White Noise (an airborne toxic event) and Libra (the Kennedy assassination) all intelligently toyed with seemingly good people that became caught up in highly amplified circumstances involving treacherous schemes and suspicious dealings. The Kills follows in these footsteps, and while House’s dialog might not be nearly as opaque as DeLillo’s, his no-nonsense approach to fast-paced, straight-forward storytelling helps him to achieve the same essential results. Even in this final installment of a four book series, the messages “Trust No One” and “Believe Nothing” burst through as loud and as clear as ever.
READ MORE:
http://www.typographicalera.com/the-h...
October 8, 2013
Conspiracy thriller, post-Iraq political satire, existentialist puzzles in the manner of Paul Auster - Richard House's epic four-book 'The Kills' has got all of this and more. (Including additional multi-media content to give more background on the characters - I only viewed half a dozen of these short films but they felt like distracting extras rather than illuminating or core to the narratives).
Each book in taut prose launches the reader into a gradually unfolding mystery. The four books are linked but not through a neat symmetry - despite a man-hunt across the Middle East and Europe running throughout - rather by a series of coincidences and echoes in which minor characters in one narrative become central in a subsequent one. It's gripping, confounding and at times very grisly.
I found the first two books and their uncovering of the corruption and mismanagement behind the re-building of war zones like Iraq the strongest and most compelling. The mysteries become more personal, more domestic in subsequent books (set against a tale of - possible/probable - serial killing) and some readers may not like the shifting focus, the game-playing and the open-ended ambiguity. I did find the lack of closure to some of the narratives a bit frustrating but there's no doubting the achievement of 'The Kills': its ambitious scope and compelling mysteries trump any minor weaknesses.
Each book in taut prose launches the reader into a gradually unfolding mystery. The four books are linked but not through a neat symmetry - despite a man-hunt across the Middle East and Europe running throughout - rather by a series of coincidences and echoes in which minor characters in one narrative become central in a subsequent one. It's gripping, confounding and at times very grisly.
I found the first two books and their uncovering of the corruption and mismanagement behind the re-building of war zones like Iraq the strongest and most compelling. The mysteries become more personal, more domestic in subsequent books (set against a tale of - possible/probable - serial killing) and some readers may not like the shifting focus, the game-playing and the open-ended ambiguity. I did find the lack of closure to some of the narratives a bit frustrating but there's no doubting the achievement of 'The Kills': its ambitious scope and compelling mysteries trump any minor weaknesses.
August 19, 2015
Yuck.
What passed off as a stylistic mannerism of detachment in the first novel of this series turns into a torturous exercise in complete detachment and lack of introspection by the end. Predictably, the reader loses all interest in these flimsy characters and their motivations by the end. Perhaps this was by design? Also, it violates Kurt Vonnegut's rule of starting the story as close to the end as possible. The level of tension in this "thriller" would be so much higher if the last 10 pages had been the first. It was a long time before anything happened and many loose ends were left unresolved. Terrible, terrible book.
What passed off as a stylistic mannerism of detachment in the first novel of this series turns into a torturous exercise in complete detachment and lack of introspection by the end. Predictably, the reader loses all interest in these flimsy characters and their motivations by the end. Perhaps this was by design? Also, it violates Kurt Vonnegut's rule of starting the story as close to the end as possible. The level of tension in this "thriller" would be so much higher if the last 10 pages had been the first. It was a long time before anything happened and many loose ends were left unresolved. Terrible, terrible book.
June 28, 2016
There are too many good books to be read rather than waste time on this cryptic tedium.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews