“It is literature with the filter off: on the one hand, an account of life as lived outside mainstream acceptance; on the other, a telling entirely unrestrained by political correctness . . . In a short space, Rent Boy is a multi-faceted little gem, a world of ‘Versailles at 78rpm,’ and the sort of funny, sick, weird little book you never forget.”

– John Self, The Critic

“A relentless stream of social commentary, careening between sex, comedy, and murder, Rent Boy is a hysterical romp through the worlds of contemporary culture and crime."

– Fantastic Fiction

“Gary Indiana is the patron saint of human detritus . . . Rent Boy is a frolicsome slip of a book . . . a relentlessly tropey, shamelessly over-the-top potboiler . . . A rude glamor radiates from the book’s prose . . . There’s the instinct to high literature, the pitch-perfect imitations of noir, the estrangement and anhedonia exquisitely expressed.”

– Bailey Trela, Cleveland Review of Books

“A funny book with a high degree of linguistic sophistication. It also contains all the four-letter words, plus graphic descriptions of sex, kinky perversions, drug abuse and mayhem . . . Danny, the ‘rent boy’ of the title, is . . . a distant, debauched cousin of Holden Caulfield—a youthful truth-teller who sees himself surrounded by phonies.”

– Michael Harris, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Indiana’s views penetrate so far beyond the usual pabulum that it requires a bit of moral courage to read them, and a dark sense of humor would also help . . . a peerless voice, one that describes a falling floor that may never find its bottom.”

– Lori Soderlind, New York Times Book Review

“[A] literary legend and cultural hellraiser . . . [Rent Boy is] his sleazy-genius book.”

– Chris Kraus, Interview Magazine

“[Indiana’s] novels mark him as the nearest thing we have to an inheritor to the Burroughs strain in American fiction. That’s the strain that breaks or simply ignores middle-class taboos; embraces narcotics and all kinds of sex; takes an interest in the uglier emotions, like disgust, shame, and hatred; applies actual pressure to American myths (the Western, the P.I., the gangster); has recourse to science fiction and narrative fracture; keeps its eye on the varieties of societal control (family, state, corporation, media); and doesn’t shy away from anything that might be mistaken for sin.”

– Christian Lorentzen, New York Magazine

“An inheritor, perhaps, of early Burroughs or John Rechy or Alexander Trocchi, or a ‘fixture,’ as journalists like to say, among the writers and artists who congregated around Manhattan’s East Village in the 1980s . . . Gary Indiana is still there, developing the vivid ire and grit of his early works into a sulfurous dissection of the American character that has few if any rivals.”

– Adrian Nathan West, The Baffler

“Indiana, a playwright, art critic, artist, and novelist with the sensibility of a rogue private investigator, is edgy in two or three ways. He’s hip and unchill, he’s lived on the edges of a lot of things, like fame and Los Angeles.”

– Sarah Nicole Prickett, Bookforum