As I mentioned in a previous post, there's a lot going on in The Skin Palace. Not all of it is profound (the theme that people will do anything to get a part in a movie is an old one), but it makes for a potent mixture, particularly toward the end of the novel.
Unfortunately, it's very slow to start. Reel 1, the first 100 pages or so, which takes time to set up the characters, feels very static, and O'Connell either doesn't have the chops or doesn't care enough to really make the humdrum feel interesting. I suspect it's the latter, because later in the novel, he becomes much better at picking out the salient detail that makes a scene come alive, even in the more quotidian settings like a basement darkroom.
For its strangeness, The Skin Palace is probably the most mimetic of all of the O'Connell's books that I've read, which is a pity. When the novel is in high gear, the strangeness takes over, and it feels like we're in a world that's a sort of cracked reflection of this one. There's nothing specific that one can call out as being impossible in our world, but the whole has a sort of phantasmagorical feel. At those times, O'Connell can then deliver an emotional punch that jumps over normal logic but feels right in this novel.
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