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Literary fiction is not often this wildly fun. . . . Nearly everything about this portrait of the cockroach as a young human is artfully executed and signals the emergence of a promising new novelist.
THE SEATTLE TIMES
Kockroach, as Knox refers to his hero, is one of the oddest innocents ever to creep through American literature . . . The one sex scene is lifted straight from the Nature Channel, but in this context, it's hilarious. . . . Don't be squeamish; pick up this witty, unsettling book.
WASHINGTON POST
An energetic tour de force that will delight lovers of experimental fiction, Kafka aficionados and fans of all things noir. . . . Lovers of tough-guy slang and neo-Raymond Chandler/James Cain dialogue will relish Mite's voice. . . . But the novel gets its originality, its humor and its kick from the way Knox applies Blatta's insect past to his human present. . . . Watching this cockroach in a beautifully tailored double-breasted suit rise to power first as a gangster, then as a businessman, is like A Bug's Life version of the Tony Soprano story. Inventively hilarious.
USA TODAY
Editor’s Choice.
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
A superb and engrossing story, a street-wise fantasy colored in shades of gray where "good" and "bad" are concepts as meaningless as the sales pitches from the tired-looking prostitutes, and where a parasite can feed to its heart's content on the core of the Big Apple itself.
THE BUFFALO NEWS
A JANUARY 2007 BOOK SENSE PICK
A dark and grimly funny look at what it means to be human today, grandly told.
BOOKSENSE.COM
Part noir, part eerie cautionary tale, part confession, Kockroach has storylines and themes that knock each other around like pool balls caroming on a table with no pockets. . . suddenly Kafka vanishes and the novel takes on the contours of Dashiell Hammett's explosive Red Harvest.
THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
At the book’s core is a story of alienation: all of the narrators are, as Mite puts it, “lonely souls looking for comfort in a world what starts out cruel on the schoolyard and goes downhill from there.” . . . Knox has a light comic touch, and the story motors along. . . . In the end Knox has less in common with Kafka than with sharp young comic novelists . . . who work in the wide shadow of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, George Saunders’s stories and The Simpsons. They write fluid, fast prose and strive to capture the sheer absurdity of ordinary American life in Technicolor plots and high-concept conceits. . . . Our Library of Congress librarians have finally missed a trick: they should have assigned it not just “Cockroaches — Fiction” but “Satires of American Life — Fiction.”
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
[A] postmodern head-trip. . .[with] a vintage gritty noir feel.
ORLANDO SENTINEL
Starred Review. Roaringly entertaining . . . Knox's inhuman antihero's tale is told in flawless noir style—Kockroach's coldness juxtaposed against Mite's bitter self-recrimination in a seedy, smoky 1950s New York—and Kockroach's insights into that New York are perversely delightful. . . . a compelling story of greed and power that is more Chandler than Kafka.
PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY
How simple. How startling. How captivating. In my little corner of the book universe, where hundreds of books tumble into my office during a single week but only a very few get noticed let alone reviewed, Mr. Knox's "Kockroach" virtually pole-vaulted to the top of the pile. . . . There is astute writing here. And memorable flourishes. . . Kockroach is his own smart force to be contended with. He is we, and we aren't above greed, base betrayals and bad food choices. Not a pretty picture? As Kockroach would say, deal with it. But before you do, first read this fine book.
WASHINGTON TIMES
A Top 5 Bestselling Book.
WHODUNIT? BOOKS, OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON
Inventive and entertaining . . . Kockroach reads like a postmodern take on some of the great Beat novels of the '50s . . .emotional costs and human-scale tragedy darken the tone and give the climax an unexpected poignancy. . . . Kockroach's key theme-that there's little difference between the unthinking, in-the-moment desires of an insect and the standard human motivations of food, sex, money and power-is explored with impressive subtlety over the course of the rise, fall and rise of an utterly amoral yet bizarrely sympathetic main character.
BOSTON'S WEEKLY DIG
A Books On First Bestseller.
BOOKS ON FIRST, DIXON, IL
A compelling version of an insect's mind slowly inhabiting the complexities of human life . . . His command of different voices, and his creation of Kockroach's psyche from scratch, may be this book's most impressive achievements. . . .Unlike "The Metamorphosis," this story will quicken your pulse; and unlike your average noir, it seeks lucid illumination of your heart.
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
Told in cold prose, the Blatta chapters are resolutely non-human, which gives him a nutty charm. . . . He's efficient, brutish and blunt. . . . It's fun watching Blatta's rise in Knox's imaginary Times Square gangland. It's fun to watch him learn chess tactics from his unlikely mentor and watching him struggle when a wrong move puts him back in the gutter. It's grim fun watching an ex-cockroach pull out of his slump by getting a job as ... an exterminator.
HARTFORD COURANT
Pick of the Week
Fast . . . Funny . . . Edgy.
QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS & MUSIC, RALEIGH, NC
Though many a strange bedfellow is picked up along the way, none could be stranger than Blatta himself. For better and worse, he is the kind of trouble stirred up only by the rarest conjunction of cranial capacity and cunning. . . ["Kockroach"] is a light pastiche, a tongue-in-cheek borrowing from so many sources that the result is a level of self-conscious singularity almost despite itself. . . .What Mr. Knox serves up is imaginative escapism, pure and simple. A nice counterweight to reality-noir.
DALLAS MORNING NEWS
A University of Manitoba Bookstore Top Ten Bestselling Book.
GO BISON!
Review Recommendation: Must Read. . . . .Stunning . . . . Darkly funny, conceptually brilliant and shockingly graphic, Kockroach is bound to be a runaway cult hit.
FILMS & BOOKS MAGAZINE
A frantic, fierce take on Kafka's Metamorphosis. . . . . The plot has the memorable clarity of fable, but it's the creepy-mythic atmospherics—imagine a hybrid of Ted Hughes's Crow poems and pulp-noir film fare like the Candyman series—that make this one cook. . . .Surreal, standout debut fiction.
KIRKUS REVIEWS
Adventurous twist of Kafka's dude-turns-into-a-roach ditty.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
A wonderfully dark comedy set in the New York underworlds of the 1950’s. Tyler Knox’s well-crafted prose provides some of the hippest banter ever uttered by a noir hero in the wildly inventive character of Kockroach.
BOOK PASSAGE
It's all a decent insect can do to maintain his dignity.
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
Filled with observations about human relationships . . . . a study of human society from a unique perspective.
LIBRARY JOURNAL
Knox's revisioning of Kafka's Metamorphosis is a dark and grimly funny look at what it means to be human today, as grandly told as an Orson Welles epic, as if he had made Citizen K instead of that other film.
KQED
Oddly compelling . . .Knox's tale is complete with heroines, harlots, and love triangles, and honest and corrupt businesspeople, cops, and politicians.
BOOKLIST
Recommended Fiction. . . . Inventive and more than a little unnerving, this tale of metamorphosis is one you'll want to scurry back to your chair to finish.
CODY’S BOOKS
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