When James Ellroy bluntly states that Jack O'Connell "is the future of the dark, literary suspense novel," one takes note. When his tomes are described as "something taken straight out of Blade Runner. Imagine Kafka writing The Maltese Falcon, or Borges or Pynchon one of Raymond Chandler's novels," well, the mix becomes intriguing, to say the least.

The thing is that O'Connell's bizarre approach is all of the above and more. Published by No Exit Press, his four books have been categorized simplistically as crime novels. And without doubt, they are very much about the dark underbelly of his fictional New England town of Quinsigamond and the writhing denizens of that strange town. We have the cops; the powerfully amped Leonore Thomas, the crazed ex-FBI agent Speer, the sickening sweat-oozing crim August Kroger.

Then we have the town itself. Quinsigamond is O'Connell's finest character. If the cityscape of Blade Runner is inherent to its power, or Batman's Gotham City a key to the vigilante's very existence, then Quinsigamond is the foul manure in which O'Connell's characters grow as deformed flowers. It is a multi textured locale that forms the base for the action in Box Nine (1992), Wireless (1993), Skin Palace (1995) and Word Made Flesh (1998). The latter was best summed up by Crime Time magazine as: "Hyper-real noir. A grotesque romance about genocide, language, bibliomania, doubt, obsession, epidermis and sanctuary."

Quinsigamond is crowded with strange locales which, with typical O'Connell word play, hint at the myriad influences in his books; a bar called Ballard's, Herzog's Erotic Palace, a nightclub called Wireless - a ruthless pun on the magazine title. For all of the grit of Quinsigamond, it is a highly literate town. Indeed in Box Nine, the town is rife with a drug known as Lingo - a shot to the brain cells governing linguistic comprehension and verbal skill.

O'Connell takes Bruce Sterling's investigations into Dead Media several steps further. The wireless, the movie camera, the book, all become metaphors for the digital age; their timeless power overwhelming their users. O'Connell's band of dwarf radio jammers are thinly veiled computer hackers, Herzog's Erotic Palace a pornographic website gone mad.

But for all the palimpsest of literary influences, O'Connell has carved his own horrendously distinct style. He does not shy from extremes and images haunt well past the moment; the flaying of Leo Tani, Speer's beating of the dwarf Olga, the creation of 'Alicia's Tale' are guaranteed nightmares to which O'Connell tells me: "I wear nightmares like badges of great honor."

When Sterling's Dead Media is raised, O'Connell responds via e-mail: "Eerily on target: Three feet to my right I have a pumpkin orange catalog, titled 'do it,' from Independent Curators Incorporated of New York, published, I think, in 1997 that features, on page 67, Sterling's 'Doing Dead Media.' And I've been a longtime proponent of Pixelvision. And so, of course, last week, in Manhattan, I wandered dizzy into the Lincoln Center cinema for the latest Ethan Hawke Hamlet and the prince carries a Pixelvision camera in several segments of the film."

Unlike the perhaps calculated cynicism of J.G. Ballard, O'Connell is to some extent from the old school of fiction writers. "The greatest bond we have is our eternal need for stories," O'Connell told Crime Time. "The need, to me, is one of the chief definitions of the human. One of Philip K. Dick's obsessive themes was 'What is Human?' Often, his answer was "the capacity for compassion." A wonderful, problematic answer. I'll stick with my story test. Machines don't need stories. Things without souls do not need stories.

"As long as we remain human, in the Phildickian sense, there will still be readers and storytellers and they will still intersect at some sacred and beautiful point that will be the story."