The Kills: Sutler, The Massive, The Kill, and The Hit

by Richard House

Overview

A MASTERWORK OF INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE SET IN THE ASHES OF WAR-TORN IRAQ, ITALY, AND AREAS IN BETWEEN.

Richard House's 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. Moving across continents, characters, and genres, there will be no more ambitious or exciting novel published this year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250052438
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	08/05/2014
Pages:	1024
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.40(h) x 2.00(d)

About the Author

Richard House is a writer, artist, filmmaker and teacher. He is the author of two short dark novels, Bruiser and Uninvited, published by Ira Silverberg in the Serpents Tail High Risk series. He is a member of the Chicago-based collaborative, Haha, whose work has appeared at the New Museum, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Venice Biennale. He teaches at the University of Birmingham, and is the editor of Fatboy Review, a digital literary magazine.

Editorial Reviews

…there are more successes than failures in these 1,000 pages. And the patience required to get through it all is made easy by House's insistent and electric prose style, which imbues long passages about corporate machinations with bristling suspense. Taken together, the four books of The Kills depict a searing landscape in which identities are lost and then stolen, and morally bankrupt institutions are aided in their corruption by the abject refusal of certain individuals to face the truth. This is not an international thriller so much as a fiercely literate attempt to subvert the thriller genre itself.

The New York Times Book Review - Christopher Rice

2014-06-01
A sprawling, subterranean, sometimes-surreal novel of the new world order, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, in which Bolaño and Pynchon wave in passing as we dodge between IEDs and sinister plots.House (Uninvited, 2001, etc.) has scarcely introduced us to civilian contractor John Jacob Ford before Ford is told to disappear: An op has been blown and it's best for him to skedaddle. What's he been doing? All kinds of shady work in Iraq for a company named HOSCO; one mission involves the transport of millions and billions of dollars in cash (easily skimmable) in "backpacks, suitcases, briefcases, even brown-paper bags." Ford, duly renamed Sutler, now finds himself in the thick of an elaborate project to construct a secret city in the desert of southern Iraq—to what purpose remains murky, but clearly it's all for the fiscal benefit of the company and the various First World flags under which it flies. (It's a nicely symbolic touch that the illusory city is to be founded atop a flaming garbage dump that doesn't officially exist.) As the story progresses, Ford/Sutler's attachment to the real world becomes increasingly tenuous: He's a shadow in a world of spooks, a cipher barely moored to the planet the rest of us inhabit. As he travels through the desert and beyond, moving from book to book (there are three more-or-less closely related tales here and a fourth that, at least in a fashion, rules them all), the stories told about him and all the weird goings-on in the Mesopotamian sands become ever more hushed, ever more fraught. That a tumultuous place such as Iraq invites Rashomon-like treatment is a commonplace, but House's tale, ingenious and well-written as it is, goes on much too long. And though he does a good job controlling details and making economical use of his secondary characters, the story is too clever by half, with threads too easy to lose.Ambitious and often brilliant. But, as one character says, "It's confusing." And so it is.

Kirkus Reviews