Word Made Flesh and Brotherhood of Mutilation
Jack O’Connell, Word Made Flesh (Perennial/HarperCollins, 2000)
I came to Word Made Flesh by chance. One evening, towards the beginning of 2003, I was surfing around Disinformation when I came across an article titled Neon Noir.
Two things immediately grabbed my attention: the tag line, 'Jack O'Connell has been described as a cyberpunk Dashiel Hammet. His dark, noir-ish crime stories are dragging the crime genre into new realms'; and the last three lines, 'But, in a gesture that recalls Phil Dick's strange worlds, when approached to do an interview, O'Connell responded with the suggestion that he conduct his own interview . . . with himself. When he showed the result to his wife, she apparently said to the author: "Jack, you are a strange man."' Then there was the interview. There are very few people who can get away with interviewing themselves, but O’Connell pulled it off without coming off like a pretentious, self-absorbed twit. (Hello Vincent Gallo.) From O’Connell’s introduction to the interview with himself, 'A lifelong resident of Worcester, Mass., O'Connell has mutated that city into Quinsigamond, the setting for all his books thus far. Q-town, according to O'Connell, is a monstrous, teeming, surreal berg loaded with gangsters and fanatics, pilgrims and killers, lunatics and mongrels, deviants and visionaries. It's the last seat of the lost American heart. And I say that with my tongue only slightly in my cheek. It's the vault that holds all my nightmares. Q-town is what the inside of my skull looks like.' I was sold.
I found a copy of Word Made Flesh at my local library. I spent the next couple of days lost in Quinsigamond.
The book opens with a jarring scene where a man is flayed alive. Then things get nasty. I don’t want to give anything away, so I’ll just say this: Over the next three hundred and twenty-six pages O’Connell takes familiar noir tropes; the tortured loner; the bleak cityscape; the femme fatale; dirty cops; gangsters; and double and triple crosses and pulls them together with strands of linguistic theory, science fiction, pop-culture, bibliomania, paranoid schizophrenia, Catholic dogma, the Holocaust, and the American immigrant experience to create an extraordinary novel about the people who create stories and the people who want to silence them.
*This piece originally appeared as part of the Lost and Found column in the May 14, 2004 edition of the webzine, Lost Pages.
Brian Evenson, Brotherhood of Mutilation (Earthling Publications, 2003)
It's difficult to avoid "cutting" puns when talking about this delightfully nasty little chapbook, but I'm going to try. The story opens with the main character, Kline, alone in his apartment. A specialist in "infiltration", Kline is taking some time of after losing his right hand to a "gentleman with a cleaver" when he receives a call from two representatives of an organisation which would like to employ him. Kline is hesitant, but they assure him that he is uniquely qualified for the job. The group who wishes to hire him are a religious brotherhood (don't call them a cult) who have some…idiosyncratic…beliefs. The group's creed is salvation through amputation and they want Kline to investigate the murder of one of their number. The job isn't quite that simple and Kline quickly gets in over his head.
Evenson's sharp, spare prose is dead on and the story is shot through with a heavy dose of black humour. That being said, this is not a light read, and is probably not for everyone. There are scenes that will make even the most hardened reader a bit queasy. If, however, you're one for the darker corners of the noir universe, this chapbook deserves some space on your shelf.
Copyright © 2004 by Neddal Ayad
Click here for Neddal Ayad's interview with Jack O'Connell
NEDDAL AYAD graduated from Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador with a Bachelor of Arts in English Language and Literature and Anthropology. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland under a large pile of books, guitars, and compact discs. He likes his noir weird. And bleak. The weirder and more bleak the better.
