The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature (1998) described him as: A writer of uncompromisingly contemporary fictions of transience and shifting realities in the modern city.
Born and educated in Auckland, where his work is largely set, he graduated BFA at Elam and has carried that interest into the strong visual quality of his writing...
The fictions often work on the edge of such conventions as the murder story ('No Sun, No Rain'), futuristic fantasy ('Somewhere in the 21st Century') or romance triangle (Pack of Lies, 'Calling Doctor Dollywell'), often through unreliable or unattractive narrators... As these literary norms are subverted, perceptions of reality and identity are challenged.
Strong visual representations, especially of sex and clothing, and filmic treatment with fragmentary and mobile scenes and chronology, provide metaphorical access to these internal concerns.
[2] Guardian Critic Maxim Jakubowski described Taylor's novel Electric (2003) as "entropy noir"[3] and praised Shirker (2000) for its "existential anomie.
"[4] Much more ambitious, and weaving a seductive web of existential anomie, is Chad Taylor's Shirker, a fascinating and obsessive novel from New Zealand with shades of Paul Auster's New York Trilogy.
Ellerslie Penrose, a part-time futures broker, finds a junkie's body in an Auckland dumpster, steals his wallet and embarks on a hallucinatory journey into the shadow life of the dead man.
This brings him into contact with fantasy bordellos, mysterious manuscripts, bizarre antiques dealers, and a sleazy nest of quirky happenstance.
Thematically, Taylor's concerns are twofold: the infinite extent of digitised culture; and the limitless flood of narcotics (not to mention the global industry behind it).
In Departure Lounge, we first glimpse a newscast tragedy — a plane that has vanished in Antarctica — before moving on to the book's narrator, Mark Chamberlain, as he shoots pool with Rory, a real estate developer who is short on scruples and whose apartment Mark later burgles... For all its nighttime street life of taxis and clubs, this is an oddly silent book.
Taylor in effect has taken the not-knowing at the mystery genre's core and enshrined it, occupied its amorphous territory and made of it, as in this slight book's emotional peak, a luminous art.
[10] In 2008 UK Guardian critic Maxim Jakubowski described Chad Taylor as a cult author: Taylor is a minimalist whose tortured characters populate a world where silence and night form a disconsolate backdrop for their musings and meanderings across a landscape of bleak, concrete cities... (He has) a profound empathy for the losers in our midst and an acute sense of place and the bizarre in everyday life.
"[14] The cast of REALITi includes Nathan Meister, Michelle Langstone, Miranda Manasiadis, Graham McTavish, Tim Wong and Aroha White.
Harry Knowles reviewed the movie at Ain't It Cool News: This is a deliberately paced mind bender ... A societal science fiction horror film.