The Skin Palace - Softcover

O'Connell (Wireless) has drawn a growing crew of captivated readers into the dark, disturbingly hilarious fictional New England city of Quinsigamond on three breathtaking excursions. On this journey into his bohemian netherworld, he both exploits and pays homage to noir films. Photo-booth clerk and aspiring photographer Sylvia Krafft finds herself hunting for a legendary photographer who might be the reclusive talent behind the undeveloped negatives found inside an antique camera. Her crawl through the city's underground takes her to Herzog's Erotic Palace, aka the Skin Palace, where Hugo Schick rules supreme, and where his assistant, Jakob Kinsky, struggles to master the art of filmmaking in secret violation of his gangster father's iron will. Jakob and Sylvia, two would-be artists, move through a net of byzantine entanglements toward revelations about themselves. On the way, they encounter pornographers, evangelists and a tribe of lost children, not to mention scores of situations in which O'Connell playfully subverts famous films, from The Wizard of Oz to Phantom of the Opera. It's a measure of O'Connell's immense talent that, while creating his absolutely original and hyperbolic world, he also paints a striking vision of the haunting ways in which life and art mirror each other.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Quinsigamond is a decaying, rust-belt New England town that harbors all the expected detritus: the crooks, the scammers, and the entrepreneurs whose stock in trade is human weakness. Hugo Schick runs Herzog's Erotic Palace, an opulent pornographic movie house. He's not quite what he seems, at least not to Sylvia Krafft, who wanders into his theater attempting to solve the mystery of the prints she found inside an antique camera. The photos recall Madonna and Child, and Sylvia senses that she and her mother may have been the models for the long-ago photo. The answer to Sylvia's odyssey lies either with Hugo or with Jacob Kinsky, the son of a mobster who wants to take over Herzog's Erotic Palace. In the course of a journey that covers no ground, takes little time, yet covers an eternity, Sylvia and Jacob come to understand both their pasts and their futures through celluloid images both static and dynamic. More like a Fellini film than a crime novel, this dense, illusory novel will propel readers into a dreamlike state where images overlap, reappear, and ultimately reconfigure into an altered reality. Confusing? Sometimes. Compelling? Intensely so. Wes Lukowsky