William Kotzwinkle

What Readers Say

William Kotzwinkle is one of those writers who gets discovered and then quietly passed along between readers who can't quite explain why the book is so good but feel certain it is. The Fan Man (1974) is the one that circulates — a short, stream-of-consciousness novel about a twenty-year-old named Horse Badorties living in a Manhattan loft so chaotic it may be sentient, surrounded by hundreds of fans creating a constant ambient drone, pursuing a plan to put on a Universal Love Concert that may or may not ever happen. The entire thing is written in Horse's distractible, present-tense, looping voice, and it's simultaneously hilarious and somehow very still in the way that the best weird fiction is.

He also wrote Doctor Rat (1976), which won the World Fantasy Award and is darker and stranger, and he wrote the novelization of E.T., which was a bestseller and introduced him to a much wider audience than the literary weird fiction crowd. The readers who know the earlier work don't always lead with the E.T. connection.

Where to Start

The Fan Man. It's short, it's the one that readers actually recommend to each other, and it's the clearest entry point into what makes Kotzwinkle worth seeking out. From there, Doctor Rat if you want something with more weight and darkness. Both are obscure enough that they may require some hunting.

Reading Context

Kotzwinkle gets mentioned alongside Hunter S. Thompson and Mark Z. Danielewski when readers are looking for American prose that does something structurally unusual — writing where the voice is the point, where the form of the narration is inseparable from the experience of reading it. He's also recommended to readers who like their fiction short, weird, and not interested in explaining itself. The comparison that comes up most naturally is Thompson, though Kotzwinkle is stranger and quieter even when he's being chaotic.