Emerson Dameron, Zine World - "I first encountered Tim Hall's writing through the long-evaporated website Bullymag.com, which published his righteous takedown of AA. Ostensibly, his first novel is also about giving up the firewater, but it's more about a young, intense New Yorker trapped between lives. Even in the book's darkest quarters, Hall underscores the humor in his characters' desperation. All the while, his writing snaps like a fallen power line. Born ranters can sometimes pull off enviable fiction."
Project Seven: "Half Empty is a meditation on alienation, humiliation, irrationality, narcissism, and the basic failure and inability of all people to live up to being as hip, good, and basically human as society says we should be. It is a story about a young man named Dennis who just got over years of heavy drinking. After his drinking days are over he gets a stupid job working at an office, goes to lame parties where board games are played, but the main action is Dennis’ interactions with two distinctly well developed characters named Laurie and Shauna....The Shauna character is a masterpiece."
Kirkus Discoveries: "First-time novelist Hall takes a few stabs at social satire—chic loft parties, twelve-step programs—but mainly sticks to the melodrama of Dennis’s love life. His characters are vivid, if somewhat overdrawn—especially Dennis, a mixture of absurd macho posturing and deflated self-loathing, with an attitude towards the opposite sex that veers between gushing sentimentality and crass sexual opportunism."
Mediadiet.net: "An awesome local novel."
