“As the decade passed, latent beauties blossomed in Killing Williamsburg. Its bricolage of genre, the narrator’s callow morbidity, and its homegrown feel turn out to be prescient forecasts of 21st-century taste. The story is an action thriller, an apocalyptic dystopia that predicts our current obsession with zombies. At its core, it is about a young, white, middle-class man’s search for authenticity in a phony world — a Catcher in the Rye for the turn of the millennium. Benson Lee, the novel’s protagonist, and his friends are all hipsters from a time before the label carried its contemporary currency. Today, hipsters are the most discussed, studied, exalted and reviled creature of the early 21st century. But at the end of 1999, the Gen X’ers who moved from Anywhere Else, USA to New York and San Francisco were just kids in baseball caps and goatees.”
—Will Kenton in The Awl
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