- Hardcover: 326 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins Canada / Fiction (May 20 1999)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0060192097
- ISBN-13: 978-0060192099
- Product Dimensions: 23.4 x 15.2 x 2 cm
- Shipping Weight: 499 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,387,098 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Booklist
This is a wildly original novel, part hard-boiled crime novel, part literary thriller, and part postapocalyptic cartoon. Scenes, characters, and the locale of Quinsigamond, a failed industrial city west of Boston, conjure echoes of the ever-nocturnal Gotham City from Tim Burton's Batman films. Into this seething netherworld of competing ethnic gangs, cabalists, defrocked Jesuits, crooked rare-book dealers, sweatshops that produce forged comic books, and a beautiful librarian obsessed by a 200-year-old murderer, the author has placed Gilrein, a cop turned cabbie. He is being menaced by August Kroger, a Bohemian crime czar and rare-book freak, and his "meatboys," but Gilrein doesn't know why. The byzantine plot is secondary here, though; the bizarre milieu, O'Connell's gracefully orotund narrative style, and his mode of explication are the reasons readers should follow Gilrein into the dark night of Quinsigamond. Thomas Gaughan
From Kirkus Reviews
Once again, O'Connell (The Skin Palace, 1996, etc.) tests the boundaries of noir mystery/suspense in this latest mind-boggling installment from Quinsigamond, Mass. Here's the story: A cabbie named Gilrein, who left the police force three years ago after his wife and colleague Ceil was killed in a raid on a bomb factory, picks up Leonardo Tani, a mid-level fence he's driven many times before, for what turns out to be his last ride. Tani falls afoul of a business rivalry between Hermann Kinsky, the unofficial mayor of the Bohemian Wing, and his aspiring lieutenant August Kroger, and gets taken out of the picture in the churningly vivid opening scene. Everyone involved, especially Kroger, is convinced Gilrein's in possession of a mysterious book missing from Tani's possession. Kroger and his creatures apply pressure. Jack responds by looking for the book. Now here's why you should take that familiar story with a grain of salt: Everyone in Quinsigamond is obsessed with horrors from the past. Gilrein can't forget the events that led up to Ceil's death. Otto Langer, the ventriloquist who drives a cab alongside Gilrein, is haunted by the Holocaustic sufferings of a girl named Alicia at the hands of Meyrink, the Censor of Maisel. Gilrein's ex-lover Wylie Brown, a former cop who's now serving as Kroger's librarian and archivist, ceaselessly gathers information about Quinsigamond legend Edgar Carwin Brockden, a visionary who killed his family and himself before any of the current cast were born. Inspector Emil Lacazze, the Jesuit who founded the Dunot Precinct's Eschatology Squad, lives to perfect the Methodology by which he bores into the hearts of the criminals he hunts. All of them, as O'Connell makes clear, are trapped in the inability of language to communicate, and the agonizing need to act out their messages instead of speaking or writing them. Under the conventions of crime and punishment, O'Connell's nightmarishly original vision of incarnation unflinchingly displays the various of harrowing ways words can indeed be made flesh. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
You are hearing the screams of a small, fat man. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
You are hearing the screams of a small, fat man. Read the first page
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Concordance
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Been There Done That,
By A Customer
This review is from: Word Made Flesh (Paperback)
Industrial fiction meets holocaust fiction and the survivor myth. The writing is good but the characters, plotting, and ideas are stale. If you perfer form to content this is a book for you. But if you like form and content to work equally well in a book then this one falls flat.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Noir at Its Finest,
By Jon M Altbergs (Epping, NH) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Word Made Flesh (Paperback)
All of the elements are here, from the gritty anti-hero to the post-industrial city to the femme fatale, you'll immediately recognize this world. However, if O'Connell were merely peddling in cliche, then "Word Made Flesh" would not be worth your time. Thankfully, O'Connell brings a little psychosis, urban fantasy, and flat-out horror to the table--think Mieville's "King Rat," Lethem's "Motherless Brooklyn" and "Gun, With Occassional Music," just about anything by Ellison, and Lacan's "Ecrits." Yeah, it's that ecclectic. The amazing thing is that O'Connell is able to make it all work without being pretentious or dense. The balancing act alone is worth the investment, and the Hitchcockian plot will grab you by the throat, shake you like a stoolie, and leave you lying in a ditch by the side of the road.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Do you like detective novels?,
By
This review is from: Word Made Flesh (Paperback)
I find this book interesting, but I do not know if I would buy anything else from this author. I was expecting more sci-fi and less of a detective novel. It is a detective novel wrapped inside of a descriptively written suspenseful thriller. If you like detective novels that are a bit on the dark side...buy this book. If you like sci-fi or horror and were hoping for a darker Blade Runner, don't buy it.The book took a long time to grab me. Around page 190 it started to pick up and become interesting. Remember that I do not like detective novels. If you do like that genre, you would be captivated after the first few pages.
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