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Quinsigamond #2
Wireless
This is a crime novel set in a decaying New England factory town, where Detective Hannah Shaw tracks down a demented ex-FBI agent who has murdered an activist priest. Jack O'Connell is also the author of Word Made Flesh, The Skin Palace, and Box Nine.
402 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
11 people are currently reading
82 people want to read
About the author
Jack O'Connell
38 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 8, 2013
I haven't read much pulp/noir fiction so I can't say too much about it stands within that genre. I will say that it was a superb bit of writing. The plot ostensibly concerns the hunt for a serial killer determined to bring order to the chaos of Quinsigamond. But it's not really about that and although some time is given to the killer's motives and mindset, those only seem to be there to serve the theme. The real drive of the book is about decay and change. When it was published in the mid 1990's at the dawn of the internet age, it's focus on radio probably seemed like a nostalgic curio. A slight hankering for a bygone time. And reading it now, 15 years after only reinforces that. But it's part of the trick, the structure. This about a steel town in decay, with it's best days behind it and it's populous struggling to find out what happens next. Will it kill them all or is there some kind of salvation to be had? It's about nostalgia for the past, a longing for something you never had and fear (and in a couple cases, acceptance) of the future and what it will bring.
I've not read the other novels in the cycle (Box 9 is up next though) so I also can't say how this plays out overall. I do know that the prose was simple, clear and more often than not like a punch to the gut. The feeling of despair and malaise in all the lives shown in this book felt very real. All the characters were complex and had lives and motivations stretching beyond the plot that tied them together.
I wish all novels were so wonderfully constructed!
I've not read the other novels in the cycle (Box 9 is up next though) so I also can't say how this plays out overall. I do know that the prose was simple, clear and more often than not like a punch to the gut. The feeling of despair and malaise in all the lives shown in this book felt very real. All the characters were complex and had lives and motivations stretching beyond the plot that tied them together.
I wish all novels were so wonderfully constructed!
February 20, 2016
I love the bright red cover that has just been published. I have now in all read three of Jack's novels. and enjoyed each one. Jack O’Connell has a kind of hallucinatory fascination amazing in its density, power, richness of detail.
November 9, 2020
I didn’t think anything but a comic book by Rob Liefeld could be as Nineties as Wireless by Jack O’Connell. It shares the Nineties comic-book and movie obsessions: grim’n’gritty tone; cool, shiny urban nightscapes; sudden, poorly motivated sex and sadistic, over-the-top violence springing out of nowhere purely to punctuate the mood pieces; hipness represented by young folks with piercings and chrome-spiked leather outfits. It’s a museum piece, a time capsule from 1993 filled to overflowing with a distilled version of what was cool back then.
Like much of 1990’s narrative, Wireless is a collage of proto-edgelord images in search of a plot – which means, to judge it, you don’t look at the plot. It would be as unfair as judging a musical or a kung fu movie by the plot. A good plot would be a bonus, but it’s not what you’re going for. What Wireless wants to give us is a bunch of cool characters bouncing off each other in a cool setting. And it gets that half right.
The characters, Oh God, please no. I don’t have to go much farther than the impossibly hot talk DJ vixen who does a show on human sexuality, a model of sexual and personal independence who is screwing the hero within two hours of meeting him and ready to settle down with him inside twenty-four, to give you an idea what they’re about. But worse happens when they open their mouths. The same kind of lengthy, stilted, pseudo-philosophical dialogue comes out of the mouths of every character in the book, whether they be insurance salesman, sexy DJ, tough cop, dwarf CPA/ballroom dancer/pirate radio DJ, homicidal psychopath, whatever, whoever – and it just keeps coming, nobody shuts up, O’Connell loves to hear himself talk and just goes on and on, like Neal Stephenson only not entertaining. The characters are a dead loss.
The setting, though? The crumbling New England mill town of Quinsigamond? It’s magnificent. O’Connell goes on for it must be five pages describing the nightclub Wireless of the title, and he puts me right there inside it: I see it; I have never seen a place like it before; I feel what it’s like to be there; it is as cool as O’Connell says it is. Every inch of the city, every mention of its politics, its history, its climate, is vividly alive and endlessly fascinating. Without sparing us the details of Quinsigamond’s decay, O’Connell makes the city so beguiling that if it existed I would want to go there, maybe even live there. I put up with the irritating characters and the “Now the story has to end, so the bad guy will grab a girl and climb to a rooftop in the city at night” plot, just to spend more time in Quinsigamond.
I understand Jack O’Connell got a lot of attention for his Quinsigamond quadrilogy when the books first came out, doubtless because what I find eye-rollingly familiar and dated was edgy and outré at the time, but the only reason I find to read the book now is the part that holds up: the city of Quinsigamond itself. As Dean Motter did in his Mister X series of comic books a few years before O’Connell began his Quinsigamond cycle, O’Connell has designed a perfect setting – and then forgot to put anything in it.
Like much of 1990’s narrative, Wireless is a collage of proto-edgelord images in search of a plot – which means, to judge it, you don’t look at the plot. It would be as unfair as judging a musical or a kung fu movie by the plot. A good plot would be a bonus, but it’s not what you’re going for. What Wireless wants to give us is a bunch of cool characters bouncing off each other in a cool setting. And it gets that half right.
The characters, Oh God, please no. I don’t have to go much farther than the impossibly hot talk DJ vixen who does a show on human sexuality, a model of sexual and personal independence who is screwing the hero within two hours of meeting him and ready to settle down with him inside twenty-four, to give you an idea what they’re about. But worse happens when they open their mouths. The same kind of lengthy, stilted, pseudo-philosophical dialogue comes out of the mouths of every character in the book, whether they be insurance salesman, sexy DJ, tough cop, dwarf CPA/ballroom dancer/pirate radio DJ, homicidal psychopath, whatever, whoever – and it just keeps coming, nobody shuts up, O’Connell loves to hear himself talk and just goes on and on, like Neal Stephenson only not entertaining. The characters are a dead loss.
The setting, though? The crumbling New England mill town of Quinsigamond? It’s magnificent. O’Connell goes on for it must be five pages describing the nightclub Wireless of the title, and he puts me right there inside it: I see it; I have never seen a place like it before; I feel what it’s like to be there; it is as cool as O’Connell says it is. Every inch of the city, every mention of its politics, its history, its climate, is vividly alive and endlessly fascinating. Without sparing us the details of Quinsigamond’s decay, O’Connell makes the city so beguiling that if it existed I would want to go there, maybe even live there. I put up with the irritating characters and the “Now the story has to end, so the bad guy will grab a girl and climb to a rooftop in the city at night” plot, just to spend more time in Quinsigamond.
I understand Jack O’Connell got a lot of attention for his Quinsigamond quadrilogy when the books first came out, doubtless because what I find eye-rollingly familiar and dated was edgy and outré at the time, but the only reason I find to read the book now is the part that holds up: the city of Quinsigamond itself. As Dean Motter did in his Mister X series of comic books a few years before O’Connell began his Quinsigamond cycle, O’Connell has designed a perfect setting – and then forgot to put anything in it.
May 21, 2019
Read this book a number of years ago and it has stuck in my memory. It is the single worse novel that I have ever read. The characters are silly, the plot is boring, and the whole mess sits and stews in pretentiousness. I picked it up because I love radio, and the idea of a mystery novel incorporating radio and jamming sounded interesting, but wow....The ridiculous seductive female DJ, the description of what is supposed to be a clever insurance salesman’s technique but in reality would send any customer running for the door....the attempts at some sort of metaphysical depth....I don’t like to pile on bad reviews, but as I said this is one I can’t forget, and that’s some kind of achievement.
July 23, 2017
I'm afraid this book didn't really do it for me. I didn't get the whole radio jamming ethos and whilst the demented killer, gang warfare part was quite exciting and kept me reading to the end I doubt I'll pick up another of Jack O'Connell's books.
April 4, 2010
Two radio connaisseurs of radios -- Philco, RCA floor models; table tops of all kinds -- set up a night club called 'Wireless' that displays their collection. The bar has booths like cubicles where wander the patrons, most of whom are radio afficianados, broadcasters, and an underground group of 'jammers', who jam the signals of legitimate broadcasts tions. Regulars fill out the clientele that form the first layer of 'Wireless'.
A half-dozen well-drawn characters drive the book's plot; chief of these are GT Flynn (a smooth insurance man by day), and Ronnie (a dj of romance and lust), whose relationship is the primary strand running through the novel.
The third elemant of the novel is supplied by Speer a psychopath on a mission to stop jamming and jammers.
We see his hyper-violent techniques when he covers a priest with the liquid benzine and burns him up fire in the confessional booth.
A parallel story -- of ethnic gangs, the thin walls between them and an ultimate war -- runs under the major story.
O'Connell shows an older generation losing power via either rebellion or a malevolent force or through simple decay.
Once the old order has been dismantled it catches fire, residents fleeing until the smoke blows away. In the guettos, groups coalesce again with lines are redrawn. The Wireless bar
goes back to normal, short the oldtimers.
A half-dozen well-drawn characters drive the book's plot; chief of these are GT Flynn (a smooth insurance man by day), and Ronnie (a dj of romance and lust), whose relationship is the primary strand running through the novel.
The third elemant of the novel is supplied by Speer a psychopath on a mission to stop jamming and jammers.
We see his hyper-violent techniques when he covers a priest with the liquid benzine and burns him up fire in the confessional booth.
A parallel story -- of ethnic gangs, the thin walls between them and an ultimate war -- runs under the major story.
O'Connell shows an older generation losing power via either rebellion or a malevolent force or through simple decay.
Once the old order has been dismantled it catches fire, residents fleeing until the smoke blows away. In the guettos, groups coalesce again with lines are redrawn. The Wireless bar
goes back to normal, short the oldtimers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 28, 2008
Elements of wish-fulfillment/Gary Stu mar Wireless slightly - but only slightly. An insane ex-FBI agent brings fire to the fictional town of Quinsigamond and those he sees as spreading chaos. I still think Word Made Flesh is his strongest book to date, but Wireless isn't a bad place to start.
October 8, 2015
My favorite of this author's Quinsigamond series. Excellent modern noir.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews