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Quinsigamond #4
Word Made Flesh
Joe Gilrein, an ex-cop turned taxi driver, must battle a twisted cast of criminals to investigate and avenge the death of his wife, which draws him back into the violent and dangerous world he has tried to leave behind. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1999
About the author
Jack O'Connell
32 books51 followersPart classic noir thriller, part mind-bending fantasy, The Resurrectionist is a wild ride into a territory where nothing is as it appears. It is the story of Sweeney, a druggist by trade, and his son, Danny, the victim of an accident that has left him in a persistent coma. Hoping for a miracle, they have come to the fortress-like Peck Clinic, whose doctors claim to have resurrected two patients who were lost in the void, hoping for a miracle. What Sweeney comes to realize, though, is that the real cure to his sons condition may lie in Limbo, a fantasy comic book world into which his son had been drawn at the time of his accident. Plunged into the intrigue that envelops the clinic, Sweeneys search for answers leads to sinister back alleys, brutal dead ends, and terrifying rabbit holes of darkness and mystery.
McConnell has crafted a mesmerizing novel about stories and what they can do for and to those who create them and those who consume them. About the nature of consciousness and the power of the unknown. About psychotic bikers, mad neurologists, and wandering circus freaks. About loss and grief and rage. And, ultimately, about forgiveness and the depth of our need to extend it and receive it.
"
McConnell has crafted a mesmerizing novel about stories and what they can do for and to those who create them and those who consume them. About the nature of consciousness and the power of the unknown. About psychotic bikers, mad neurologists, and wandering circus freaks. About loss and grief and rage. And, ultimately, about forgiveness and the depth of our need to extend it and receive it.
"
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
February 7, 2009
The world of Word Made Flesh wavers uneasily between ours and... somewhere else. The Northeastern American city of Quinsigamond does not appear on our maps (though there does appear to be a Quinsigamond Village in or near Worcester, MA), but it is a familiar place to anyone whose mental geographies include, say, China Miéville's New Crobuzon, or Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, or Frank Miller's Sin City, perhaps, or the later Batman's dark Gotham City. Quinsigamond is a great city that has fallen on hard times, drawn in unrelieved red and black, bone-gray and white, like the dust jacket of the book itself. Its grand architecture is in decay. The factories have closed and the streets are unswept. Its various European ethnicities have not mixed in the melting pot quite as much as one might hope. So much is familiar from our own Rust Belt.
But Quinsigamond is not a mere placeholder for any of the cities in our familiar atlases and gazetteers. It exists in addition to these places, in some sidewise plane.
Likewise, the European country of Old Bohemia exists in parallel to other, more familiar names, sandwiched among nations which too went through their fascist and bellicose periods, but are now much quieter. Nazis are mentioned, but Old Bohemia seems to have had its own individual Holocaust, as one part of which an entire Jewish quarter of the city of Maisel was... obliterated.
Word Made Flesh is not always an easy book to read. The frame of O'Connell's fiction allows him to describe this event, and others, in lyrical and documentary terms almost as unrestrained as the crimes they portray.
It is the characters inhabiting Quinsigamond, though, who allow us to engage with it and appreciate its decadent beauty. Gilrein (if he ever had a first name, no one seems to know it) is our primary viewpoint, an ex-cop who is now driving a cab using a license inherited from his father, trying to survive and stay independent by taking passengers in places where the Red and the Black (the bloated and corrupt cab companies which have divided up most of Quinsigamond between them) will not venture. Hence his fares are often the felons he would formerly have arrested. They appreciate the irony, more than Gilrein does. Gilrein spends most of his days mourning his wife Ceil, also a cop, killed in the line of duty during a raid on a rogue printing operation.
Words... words suffuse this book, spill over its edges, inhabit not only its pages but every mossy, malodorous crevice of Quinsigamond's days and nights. A mysterious and incurable plague known as the Grippe attacks the tongue and causes strange speeches, before stealing words entirely. Ceil's former supervisor, the mad Inspector Emil Lacazze, has built his career upon a Methodology of prisoner interrogation based on word association. The most powerful crime bosses in the city, men like the bloodthirsty and elegant Bohemian immigrant August Kroger, fancy themselves litterateurs and bibliophiles. Kroger has gone so far as to hire himself a personal librarian. And Gilrein himself turns out to be the one who gave Leo Tani his last cab ride - Leo, who died shortly thereafter, due to his unfortunate mishandling of one very special book.
I wax verbose, and I've still only scratched the surface of this richly rewarding book. But then, as O'Connell says on p. 182, what happened to me when I read Word Made Flesh is simple, and it may happen to you as well:
"It's an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text."
You have been warned.
But Quinsigamond is not a mere placeholder for any of the cities in our familiar atlases and gazetteers. It exists in addition to these places, in some sidewise plane.
Likewise, the European country of Old Bohemia exists in parallel to other, more familiar names, sandwiched among nations which too went through their fascist and bellicose periods, but are now much quieter. Nazis are mentioned, but Old Bohemia seems to have had its own individual Holocaust, as one part of which an entire Jewish quarter of the city of Maisel was... obliterated.
Word Made Flesh is not always an easy book to read. The frame of O'Connell's fiction allows him to describe this event, and others, in lyrical and documentary terms almost as unrestrained as the crimes they portray.
It is the characters inhabiting Quinsigamond, though, who allow us to engage with it and appreciate its decadent beauty. Gilrein (if he ever had a first name, no one seems to know it) is our primary viewpoint, an ex-cop who is now driving a cab using a license inherited from his father, trying to survive and stay independent by taking passengers in places where the Red and the Black (the bloated and corrupt cab companies which have divided up most of Quinsigamond between them) will not venture. Hence his fares are often the felons he would formerly have arrested. They appreciate the irony, more than Gilrein does. Gilrein spends most of his days mourning his wife Ceil, also a cop, killed in the line of duty during a raid on a rogue printing operation.
Words... words suffuse this book, spill over its edges, inhabit not only its pages but every mossy, malodorous crevice of Quinsigamond's days and nights. A mysterious and incurable plague known as the Grippe attacks the tongue and causes strange speeches, before stealing words entirely. Ceil's former supervisor, the mad Inspector Emil Lacazze, has built his career upon a Methodology of prisoner interrogation based on word association. The most powerful crime bosses in the city, men like the bloodthirsty and elegant Bohemian immigrant August Kroger, fancy themselves litterateurs and bibliophiles. Kroger has gone so far as to hire himself a personal librarian. And Gilrein himself turns out to be the one who gave Leo Tani his last cab ride - Leo, who died shortly thereafter, due to his unfortunate mishandling of one very special book.
I wax verbose, and I've still only scratched the surface of this richly rewarding book. But then, as O'Connell says on p. 182, what happened to me when I read Word Made Flesh is simple, and it may happen to you as well:
"It's an old story, really: seduced and corrupted, in the end, by an obsessive love for the text."
You have been warned.
April 22, 2015
I've read five of Jack O'Connell's books (Box 9, Wireless, Skin Palace, Word Made Flesh and Resurrectionist), and this is the best. In every one, you get the fantastic physical descriptions and weird mix of realism and metaphorical fantasy. But the story here is the most coherent and profound - in my humble opinion. I do think that some experience with O'Connell's style and worldview is helpful in approaching a book like Word Made Flesh, so I was fortunate to have read three others before I tackled it. For me, it added up to one of the best books I've ever read.
April 16, 2023
Il libro è una sorta di mistery-noir surreale, appena venato di weird.. non sarebbe stato male, con una storia cruda e diretta, se non si fosse attorcigliato su se stesso, affogato in un turbinio di discorsi e parole, in una spirale di inutile verbosità.. di certo non c'entra nulla col cyberpunk come scritto sulla cover.. Ma che libro hanno letto? 😂😅
October 22, 2022
Well-written, unique....and wtf? I couldn't imagine a story like this in a million years. Probably not the book for your reading club.
February 13, 2013
As the book opens, we're spectators in a kind of church-slash-operating theater, observers at a ceremony in which Leo Tani, a flabby fence nicknamed the 'Shank, is hoisted up on hooked chains and lovingly, ritualistically flayed in gruesome detail. We could be excused for checking the book cover one more time to make sure we didn't grab some Clive Barker Cenobite saga by mistake. We thought this was supposed to be a crime novel. But Jack O'Connell doesn't travel down the mean streets we might be familiar with, and it shouldn't take us long to figure out "Word Made Flesh" is not your average crime novel.
We're in Quinsigamond, a Yankee, post-industrial hellhole of abandoned factories, stygian alleyways, "meatboy" gunsels and twisted police. An ex-cop named Gilrein pilots a Checker indie cab through the night (to the strains of Bernard Hermann, no doubt). Where once "Gilrein rode Tani's chubby ass as if he were God's own cop ... Now he plays chauffeur to the 'Shank, hauling him from exchange to exchange and always pocketing the overgenerous tip." When Leo disappears, aspiring neighborhood "mayor" (crime boss) and mad rare-book aficionado August Kroger sends his thugs, Raban and Blumfeld, to question Gilrein. The meatboys drag him into an alley for the interrogation, beating him and demanding "the package" until Oster, one of Gilrein's cop colleagues, comes to the rescue with an Ithaca pump. Gilrein resists the pushy entreaties from his former brethren to rejoin the force and its elite unit of alpha-male badasses, the Magicians. ("It's like being a priest. You can't just walk away. It marks your soul forever.")
The mystery of Leo's death drives Gilrein to the casebooks of his deceased wife, Ceil. (No one in this book has a real name, like Chester or Susie.) Ceil was also on the force, a member -- the only member, in fact -- of the E (for Eschatology) Squad run by Emil Lacazze, a man known as the Inspector, "the department's Rasputin." A former Jesuit, the Inspector applies the methods of critical thinking to solve crimes and mindrape suspects into confessing.
"There was a time when there appeared to be no case that Inspector Lacazze could not unravel using his Methodology. During his first season of total autonomy he began to accumulate successes like a mad and compulsive collector. Word started to spread ... horrible, whispered fables about the voodoo cop, the mojo bull, the dark priest with his candle and his mirror, his sweet wine and terrifying eyes, and, worst of all, his voice, this noise that came out of his throat in a bark and jumped inside of you, broke into your head, found a way inside your brain no matter what you did and repeated word after word after word until you were ready to chew your own arms out of the cuffs and run into the night, screaming like the devil had his hands around your heart."
Ceil was slain in an explosive confrontation with the Tung, a cabal of anarcho-terrorists dedicated to the destruction of the printed word. The disaster cost Ceil her life and the Inspector his job. Fallen from the Jesuits, fallen from the police department, he freelances around the edges of the law. As we read deeper into Ceil's notes, we learn that she was primarily investigating Lacazze himself and his efforts to break down and unlock language and force it to his own purposes.
Along with his extralegal work, the Inspector plays backseat confessor to Otto Langer, one of Gilrein's fellow gypsy hacks. The answers Gilrein seeks very likely reside in Otto's memories(?) of the Erasure, the obliteration of a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European city named Maisel.
"Word Made Flesh" is going to tax our suspension of disbelief. The dialog is luridly purple, the characters are exaggerated to the point of grotesquerie, and the story's not very plausible. That's going to be a problem for some readers. Satirical touches -- such as August Kroger's sweatshop full of underage illegal immigrants locked in veal cages to produce comic books for Kroger's publishing racket -- are likely to irritate noir purists. And the book is more than a little pretentious. O'Connell shouldn't leave his Pynchon hanging out like that. But we make allowances for ambition round here and give points for originality. Like Frank Miller's "Sin City," this is crime fiction touched with the otherworldly. "Word Made Flesh" is an exercise in style, noir pushed to its horrific ultimate. O'Connell is less concerned with reality than with twisting genre tropes to the breaking point.
If James Ellroy approves (and, intentionally or not, O'Connell's physical descriptions of August Kroger make the villain sound quite a bit like Ellroy himself), who are we to say otherwise?
We're in Quinsigamond, a Yankee, post-industrial hellhole of abandoned factories, stygian alleyways, "meatboy" gunsels and twisted police. An ex-cop named Gilrein pilots a Checker indie cab through the night (to the strains of Bernard Hermann, no doubt). Where once "Gilrein rode Tani's chubby ass as if he were God's own cop ... Now he plays chauffeur to the 'Shank, hauling him from exchange to exchange and always pocketing the overgenerous tip." When Leo disappears, aspiring neighborhood "mayor" (crime boss) and mad rare-book aficionado August Kroger sends his thugs, Raban and Blumfeld, to question Gilrein. The meatboys drag him into an alley for the interrogation, beating him and demanding "the package" until Oster, one of Gilrein's cop colleagues, comes to the rescue with an Ithaca pump. Gilrein resists the pushy entreaties from his former brethren to rejoin the force and its elite unit of alpha-male badasses, the Magicians. ("It's like being a priest. You can't just walk away. It marks your soul forever.")
The mystery of Leo's death drives Gilrein to the casebooks of his deceased wife, Ceil. (No one in this book has a real name, like Chester or Susie.) Ceil was also on the force, a member -- the only member, in fact -- of the E (for Eschatology) Squad run by Emil Lacazze, a man known as the Inspector, "the department's Rasputin." A former Jesuit, the Inspector applies the methods of critical thinking to solve crimes and mindrape suspects into confessing.
"There was a time when there appeared to be no case that Inspector Lacazze could not unravel using his Methodology. During his first season of total autonomy he began to accumulate successes like a mad and compulsive collector. Word started to spread ... horrible, whispered fables about the voodoo cop, the mojo bull, the dark priest with his candle and his mirror, his sweet wine and terrifying eyes, and, worst of all, his voice, this noise that came out of his throat in a bark and jumped inside of you, broke into your head, found a way inside your brain no matter what you did and repeated word after word after word until you were ready to chew your own arms out of the cuffs and run into the night, screaming like the devil had his hands around your heart."
Ceil was slain in an explosive confrontation with the Tung, a cabal of anarcho-terrorists dedicated to the destruction of the printed word. The disaster cost Ceil her life and the Inspector his job. Fallen from the Jesuits, fallen from the police department, he freelances around the edges of the law. As we read deeper into Ceil's notes, we learn that she was primarily investigating Lacazze himself and his efforts to break down and unlock language and force it to his own purposes.
Along with his extralegal work, the Inspector plays backseat confessor to Otto Langer, one of Gilrein's fellow gypsy hacks. The answers Gilrein seeks very likely reside in Otto's memories(?) of the Erasure, the obliteration of a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European city named Maisel.
"Word Made Flesh" is going to tax our suspension of disbelief. The dialog is luridly purple, the characters are exaggerated to the point of grotesquerie, and the story's not very plausible. That's going to be a problem for some readers. Satirical touches -- such as August Kroger's sweatshop full of underage illegal immigrants locked in veal cages to produce comic books for Kroger's publishing racket -- are likely to irritate noir purists. And the book is more than a little pretentious. O'Connell shouldn't leave his Pynchon hanging out like that. But we make allowances for ambition round here and give points for originality. Like Frank Miller's "Sin City," this is crime fiction touched with the otherworldly. "Word Made Flesh" is an exercise in style, noir pushed to its horrific ultimate. O'Connell is less concerned with reality than with twisting genre tropes to the breaking point.
If James Ellroy approves (and, intentionally or not, O'Connell's physical descriptions of August Kroger make the villain sound quite a bit like Ellroy himself), who are we to say otherwise?
January 17, 2011
This is a great book. It's not available on Kindle, which is a bummer, but it's well worth tracking down a paperback copy. There is a great deal of very graphic violence. So, I would not recommend this book to anyone squeamish. It's definitely one of the best books I've read in months.
January 26, 2011
This was disturbing and gorgeous and the language of it beautiful, which is appropriate because it's about language and perception of self and censorship and god, god, this was great. Great is not a good enough word for it, really. This was stunning.
June 13, 2012
A very strange and disturbing book (seriously, some of the scenes gave me nightmares), beautifully written, but so dark and bleak.
May 27, 2019
The blurb on the cover says "Blade Runner as imagined by Kafka in a dream by Fritz Lang" but it fails to live up to this. There is a detective story at the heart of the book, which is set in a decaying futuristic urban landscape, and the protagenist is an ex cop taxi driver (with a tragic personal history, of course), but he does not do all that much detective work. This is no procedural, there is little actual investigating. Instead things just seem to happen to him, he finds himself at the centre of the events without fully understanding why, and stumbles to the horrible (and fairly predictable) truth by the end. So its not much of a crime novel. The depiction of the future world is reminiscent of William Gibson but less effective or immersive. There is plenty of graphic violence and grotesque characters with odd habits and bizarre situations but it all feels a bit grafted on. The central historical crime of the novel also feels weirdly anachronistic with respect to the rest of the book. However, the main problem with this book is it's overwritten, with too much repetition, too much unnecessary exposition, much of it predictable and hackneyed; too many fragments, asides, dead-ends, etc, which contribute little to the central plot and feel used for effect. Too many characters are explained to us rather than just being, like a bad film with too much dialogue or flash/style making up for lack of storytelling. Having said that, I liked the book enough to finish it, and if I didn't completely engage with it there was enough to keep it ticking over.
August 6, 2011
This book wasn't really for me. I picked it up to try something new. I like reading books because I'm more drawn to characters, and this books jumps around to much to have any kind of character focus. I think the book is great for it genre, but again I'm not into these types of books (clearly if you look at the other books I have read.)
December 4, 2015
supernatural-touched noir scuffed with violence and the madness of language. ugly, but in a pretty good way. a bit too much with the obvious and the cliched, here and there, but also some very unique aspects that carry the book to the end. somewhere between a less stylized brian evenson or a pynchon novel where someone removed all the jokes.
April 19, 2007
I thought this was a very stylish, and ambitious book that went off in many interconnected directions.
For me those tangents never quite conntected in a compelling way. Still, it's unique and kinda cool in the Sin City sorta of way.
For me those tangents never quite conntected in a compelling way. Still, it's unique and kinda cool in the Sin City sorta of way.
March 30, 2009
hard to describe... very odd and creepy
January 22, 2011
Stumbled on this one years ago. I cannot visit a bookstore without cruising the mystery aisles looking for him. Seems hard to find.
Want to read
January 27, 2011recommended by A.
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May 1, 2017Edition: New Ed
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May 1, 2017Paperback
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews