Teenage Hallucination

by Matthew Kinlin

The account of a family visited by an angel at midday.

169 pages, Paperback

Published February 11, 2021

About the author

Glasgow // he/him // writer

https://linktr.ee/matthew_kinlin

https://www.instagram.com/obscene_mirror

Reviews

[Janie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wholly visual. Colors and crystalline paragraphs excite the eye and seduce the brain/body. Insectile treacle and bloody passages gleam while shadows are forcefully torn away. Hallucination is a prayer of maniacal spirits and soft victims. Kafka wept.

[Thomas Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matthew Kinlin’s debut novel is perfectly named in that it pulses with lust, romance, confusion, violence and dreams. Each page feels like a living and breathing organism – visually arresting, with changing fonts, cut-up style looking chunks of text that deviate from those that surround each other. Symbols and diagrams disrupt and plant the forever morphing prose that switches from abstract to conversational.

There is someone of the New York School about this book and the influence of John Ashbery looming within its joyfully oblique spasms of text.

Teenage Hallucination is an unquestionably queer celebration of writing, blood and fucking – all of that and none of it at the same time. “We spread our ass cheeks in unison like Copacabana extravaganza” declares one page. How can I not fall in love with this?

Kinlin is a thoroughly exciting writer whose work arouses me in all manner of warped and confusing ways and his first novel is an absolute gem.

[Mason Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are points in Matthew Kinlin's Teenage Hallucination when the language lifts from the page. The structure of the book feels like a web punctuated by significant intersections, a free-floating molecular model. It is disparate and severed but universal. When language is repeated the words slice and everything around it bubbles and percolates with violence and grace, savagery and mysticism. Teenage Hallucination is challenging, but it is a delight to read. I finished it in two sittings. One of the best things I have read in 2021!

[Kenneth Cale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Each page of Teenage Hallucination contains more poetry than most chapbooks. This is western civilization dumpstered and compacted and then stanleyknived until it oozes four new gospels of disquieting nectar.

[Bob Comparda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Visual and violent text that flows like poetry and jars the imagination. I felt as if I was looking into the eyes of the angel of death and in the moment before my head explodes I am forced to view a nightmare that only lasts a millisecond but seems like an eternity.

[Viv · Rating 1 out of 5]

Blah.

The Emperor's New Clothes.

More Warner Brothers presents Warren Buffet than William Burroughs.

11/9