The Bird Room: A Novel

“A dark and beguiling meditation on the weight of being…so fresh it practically pings with energy…The Bird Room is seamlessly woven into a perfectly formed whole that fizzes with deadpan wit and cutting one-liners.” —The Independent

An audacious and self-assured debut novel, The Bird Room by Chris Killen is sometimes darkly comic, sometimes painfully dramatic, and always entirely engaging. Reminiscent of other up-and-coming authors such as Tao Lin, Richard Milward, and Toby Litt, and with a spare and efficient style that belies the intricacies of the novel’s double narrative, The Bird Room is a dark, edgy tale of sex, love, and obsession.

Painfully average and introverted Will finally has a bird. Her name is Alice. She's smart, sexy, and much to Will's surprise, she is in love with him. But the course of love never did run smooth, and soon devotion—and its uglier manifestations—lead Will to a dark place within himself.

Elsewhere in the city, Helen is an actress—or she will be some day. For now, she finds work as a "model"—or whatever her online acquaintances need her to be. Her real name is Clair, but she desperately wants to be someone new, someone glamorous and real—someone worth something.

A love story with a twist, this exuberant and funny debut novel brings Will and Helen's lives together in a tale as tight as a rope and as black as tar. Sharp, playful, and brimming over with wicked comedy, The Bird Room heralds the arrival of a major new literary talent.

“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