Totally Killer

by Greg Olear

Book Overview

"Smart, unexpected, and wonderfully savage in its humor. Totally Killer nails, without mercy, the mood and minutiae of a weary America at the end of the 20th century."
--Brad Listi, author of Attention. Deficit. Disorder.

Debut novelist Greg Olear gets nostalgic for a recently bygone era with Totally Killer--a quirky, darkly funny, and fiendishly clever noirish tale of intrigue and suspense. The '90s are back in this brilliant...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061735299
• ISBN13: 9780061735295
• Release Date: September 2009
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Dark, funny page turner

I devoured Totally Killer in a couple of evenings, and I thoroughly enjoyed it both as a thriller and as a darkly comic rendering of New York in the early 90's. A lot of the things I loved about it have already been touched on by other reviewers, but I wanted to add that I really dug the conspiracy stuff. As a fan of Pynchon and Robert Anton Wilson, I'm a sucker for novels that delve in that territory. And the great thing about Totally Killer--as opposed to say, Gravity's Rainbow or The Illuminatus Trilogy--is that you CAN finish it in a couple of evenings and at the end of it you'll even know what happened. Also I was particularly taken with the character of Taylor Schmidt, a clever, unexpected spin on the classic femme fatale. When they start casting for the Totally Killer movie, hot young actresses will be lining up around the block to play this role. Highly recommended if you like your thrillers smart, edgy and funny as heck.

A classic page-turner

This book totally delivers what the title promises, and will definitely keep you reading. Olear paints a vivid and entertaining picture of the 90's in NYC. Full of suspense, nostalgia, and cynical wit. Highly recommended!

sex! violence!

Sex! Violence!! C'mon, who doesn't dig on that? At least in their pop-entertainment. Read this book on the recommendation of a friend & wasn't disappointed. Kept me up late racing to the finish line. Totally Killer is a fun and warped journey back in time - summer of 1991. I was just in high school back then, but this book evokes that era with smart, funny and spot-on commentary, stuffed with pop culture references and plenty of eerie parallels to 2009. Go out and buy this book today - make sure that you can boast of having the edition with the original cover (which is also like, totally killer) when the inevitable movie tie-in comes out with Scarlett Johansson sporting a denim mini skirt and .44 caliber on the front. And did I mention: Violence! Sex!!

Good stuff

This book is a really fun read. Sex, murder, conspiracies, black comedy, and New York in the early 1990s. Told from the perspective of today, the story straddles both eras really well - the two settings being the end of the two Bush eras make for a lot of interesting parallels. For those of us who remember what the world was like before internet, before the neo-tech era, it's a trip down memory lane with all the awkwardness of the time. For those readers who don't have that experience, the book captures just what the times were like. Olear has a gift for the analogy, and it's great to see someone present the world of the early 90s so well with a mixture of fondness and poison. I think it's the first book I've read that really presents the that era as it was. Except for the thriller element. Nothing in my life at that time was as exciting....

Totally awesome!

An old college buddy recommended I read this book, claiming "it would take me back to my college days". He wasn't kidding, this book had me totally wrapped up in the early nineties, I even found myself instinctively putting on the Femmes as I would sit down each night to devour more pages. I loved the pre-Starbucks references to "listserv", "swatch" "Hanz and Franz" and "Spy magazine". You can tell this book is well-researched (thank God for Wikipedia, so I could keep up). Well worth the ten bucks and ten hours of page flipping.