The Skin Palace
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
A crime boss’s son and an amateur photographer embark on a strange journey
Nothing matters to Jakob besides film noir. Ever since he was six years old, when his nanny first took him to the cinema, he has known that filmmaking is his future. His first script, Little Girl Lost, is finished, and as he prepares for production, he feels destiny within his grasp. Nothing stands in his way but his father, a boss in the Quinsigamond underworld who wants his son to be a killer, not an auteur. Aspiring photographer Sylvia Krafft is trapped as well, bound by her husband’s rigid ambition and lack of artistic temperament. Undeveloped negatives inside a used camera lead Sylvia on a quest for the man who took the pictures, and she soon finds herself at Herzog’s Erotic Palace, a porno house where Jakob works. As the duo attempt to realize their ambitions, they journey into a twisted world where art and death are endlessly intertwined.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
