Grime story

Descending into Quinsigamond in Jack O'Connell's Word Made Flesh is one scary taxi ride

by Laura Kiritsy

Not since a masochistic attempt at earning a Girl Scout sewing badge has the simple act of poking a moist thread through the eye of a needle evoked such personal terror. For a few pricked fingertips cannot compare to the predicament in which Gilrein, the hero of Jack O'Connell's Word Made Flesh, finds himself as the grim fable unfolds.

He is having his lips sewn shut.

And possibly his eyes, if he does not divulge the whereabouts of an extremely rare and valuable book belonging to his nemesis, August Kroger, who with "a clipped rectangle of a mustache" slightly resembles . . . you guessed it. Only trouble is Gilrein, the poor sucker, hasn't the faintest notion of where the hell Kroger's coveted tome could be.

And so the reader is treated to a play-by-play of every bloody stitch as "the needle slides in and up, through the soft tissue of lip, breaking blood vessels and igniting a warm flow of liquid down the chin, off the chin and down onto the front of the shirt." At once repulsive and fascinating, the scene is unavoidably gripping, aided by O'Connell's suspenseful description. By the time Gilrein is exploding with a deafening silent scream of "I don't know!" -- and as the needle jabs his tender eye-lid -- you are pleading along with him, "He doesn't know already!" And as Kroger realizes the same (acknowledging so with a sinister fit of laughter), Gilrein is kicked to the curb with a pair of scissors for his trouble.

Never mind that less than 24 hours earlier, the ex-cop turned indie cab driver had the stuffing kicked out of him by two of Kroger's thugs, who mistakenly believed that his last cab customer, the tubby, low-rent fence Leo Tani, had squealed to Gilrein on the whereabouts of said book: an eyewitness account of a holocaust in the foreign city of Maisel, bound in the carefully harvested and cured flesh of its author. When Tani failed to deliver the book to Kroger, he was skinned alive and strung up like a side of beef.

Word Made Flesh is a nightmare set in the bleak metropolis of Quinsigamond, a city filled with shady dealings that take place in the dark shadows of decrepit factory buildings, all night-diners, and seedy nightclubs Corruption, madness, and murder are not merely the ills of urban living, they are lifestyle choices. Inhabited by exiles, misfits, crooks, and the criminally insane, Quinsigamond is brewing with people who have some sordid tale that they're (sometimes literally) dying to tell, and it seems that words just aren't sufficient to get the point across.

"I don't think there's a non-neurotic character in the whole book," laughs Worcester native O'Connell of his recent release. "Everybody's sort of pushed right to the limit by their own particular joneses."

After reading O'Connell's fourth novel (his Box Nine was recently optioned for a movie), you could conclude that the man himself may have already crossed the line; and O'Connell, who doubles as an associate director of public affairs at Holy Cross, acknowledges he has been met with hesitancy by some bookstore managers who expect some sort of wild-eyed lunatic to burst through their doors. At a recent reading at Framingham's Barnes & Nobel, two listeners beelined for the door before O'Connell had read half of chapter one, the brilliantly voyeuristic peek at Leo Tani's exfoliation. "I could see the absolute disgust on their faces and they got up and left," O'Connell confesses, though he admits it is better than putting people to sleep.

Self-described as "the squarest guy in the world," O'Connell concedes that he does have a secret heart that reveals itself in the attic where he holes himself up to pen his tales. "The act of writing fiction is sustained by the subconscious . . . and the things that are bubbling around in your dreams are gonna take over sooner or later." This guy probably hasn't had a peaceful night's sleep in about six years.

Despite the dim view of humanity proffered in Word Made Flesh, the author doesn't see his world-view as entirely bleak. He holds firmly to beliefs in redemption and pockets of hope and faith (however small) in a society he sees as being trampled by media images of daily atrocities. "At my weakest moments, I think I subscribe to that school of writers, and Hemingway was probably one of them, who believed life is war. That's our nature. We're animals with the capacity for compassion. You have to sort of face the darkest part of the nature of life and still be adamant about insisting on refusing to let your heart get scabbed over."

And so Gilrein, a modern, mythic hero, descends into the grimy depths of Quinsigamond on a quest to uncover the mystery of Kroger's stolen text. Living for the past three years in an abandoned barn, Gilrein is a ghost of his former self, never having recovered from t he death of his beloved wife, Ceil, a cop who was blown to bits in a botched raid on the Tung headquarters, a terrorist organization dedicated to eradicating the written word. Gilrein gets more than he bargained for on his journey and painfully confronts his own demons, eventually regaining some self-respect as he unravels the mystery behind Ceil's tragic demise. Gilrein is the Everyman described in Joseph Campbell's classic examination of myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, an average Joe pulled out of his ordinary life and placed on an extraordinary path to self-discovery. In O'Connell's imaginative and densely packed novel, Gilrein's path is more littered than most.

"I take characters who I genuinely care about and I put them in a pressure cooker," O'Connell explains of the mythic structure of Word Made Flesh. "I put them in dangerous and conflicted situations that can't help but cause life changing revelations and shifts in consciousness. I like to think that in most instances I allow them some avenue of hope or redemption."

The driving force behind the novel concerns humanity's relationship to language and its more tangible form: books. The characters surrounding Gilrein grapple with what they feel are the inabilities of language to effectively tell their stories, and therein lies the madness and disease that eventually befalls several of them. The most startling depiction of this theme concerns Otto Langer's tale, the story of the holocaust in Maisel, a European city O'Connell says is "Kafka's worst dream about Prague." Otto survived the holocaust of the Maisel Jews 10 years earlier and fled to Quinsigamond with nothing but the story of his people, who were literally erased by being fed into the Pulpmeister, an oversized tree shredder.

Otto is desperate to unburden himself of the atrocity by obsessively telling and retelling the story, to no avail. What he would really like to do is "restage every heinous instant of that night in July, replay it right here on the streets of my new home, for everyone to see and hear and smell, replay it until they could never forget what they had witnessed." He will later tell his confidant, the mysterious linguistics nut, inspector Emil Lacazze, "The best I can do for you, however, is simply tell the story."

Like Otto, "story is everything" to O'Connell. "Not just in terms of my craft as a writer. I have almost a religious belief that as human beings, we need story. It's in our DNA, it's part of who we are, it's sustenance to us. This is why mythology was born -- to give voice and give form to the universe."

Word Made Flesh is evidence that O'Connell has mastered his craft; he weaves together the various plots as the story winds its way to a surprising and bloody conclusion, using the conventions of science fiction, horror, literary thriller, and the gritty style of the crime novel, with some nice pulp-fiction touches thrown in to keep things really bizarre. For example, Otto's sidekick Zwack, a ventriloquist's dummy that serves as his golem in what proves to be his most disturbing effort to tell the story of the Erasure in Maisel. Described as a "cross between a Gothic woodcarving of some nightmare plagued folk artist and a Raggedy Ann doll that's been dragged through a thousand ghettos in the teeth of a mange-scarred dog," Zwack and Otto hijack an open-mic stage at a local dive to the horror of its patrons, including Gilrein.

It is well-known by now that Worcester, with its looming, lifeless factory buildings and desolate dinosaur of a train station serves as the blue print for the fictional world of Quinsigamond. However, it is quite clear after reading Word Made Flesh that its townies aren't fleeing to Boston and Providence to find the action on a Saturday night. "It's not so much that it's this exact translation from Worcester into Quinsigamond," O'Connell says over coffee at the Corner Lunch, which, naturally, overlooks Quinsigamond Avenue. "It [the novel] sort of takes theses building blocks that are Worcester and then I just let my imagination run roughshod over them," he laughs. If Quinsigamond is the Worcester of Jack O'Connell's imagination, then maybe he needs to run for City Council.