“The prose has camera-eye immediacy. In a more recent book, “The Conversations” (2002), Ondaatje explored with Walter Murch the mysteries and wonders of film editing. In “The Collected Works of Billy the Kid,” he was already obsessively feeding off this craft from another medium. He doesn’t so much tell the story as splice it together, weaving together moments and sequences, cutting between emotions, or from image to image, shaking the kaleidoscope for maximum effect. The book doesn’t read like a film, but it stays in the imagination like one, dream-like, so that its characters start to haunt us.”

–Richard Rayner, http://franciscovazbrasil.blogspot.com/2009/10/tricks-with-knife-by-richard-rayner.html