Interviewing writer Jack O'Connell is an exercise in frustration. The author of the novels Box Nine, Wireless, The Skin Palace and Word Made Flesh, he has been described by allies and critics alike as "moody," "reclusive," "suspicious," "litigious," and "mercurial." So it should have come as no surprise when he insisted on conducting our interview entirely in his car (a 1965 Buick Special convertible) while driving around the streets of his hometown from midnight until the early morning hours.

A request for a bio sheet, yielded the following from his publicist:

Scion of a family of long-time carnival owners, Jack O'Connell was the last proprietor and manager of the notorious Castlebar Traveling Circus. A self-described "professional schlemiel," O'Connell turned to novel writing in his teens due to a perverse interest in "dying media." His first work, the teen epic Refugee, was self-published by Sepulchre Press and became a fixture in high school rest rooms along the East Coast of America. O'Connell retired from the carnival industry in the early 1980s and formed Mill City Pictures with his brother, Abbie. Their first feature, the anime thriller A Shooter's Bible, won an honorable mention at the Cusco Film Festival.

At various times in his life, O'Connell has worked as a dishwasher at an Air Force base, trucker's aid, janitor, insurance salesman, bookbinder, parking lot attendant, census taker, editor, bid monitor, stock clerk, courier, real estate broker, and fry cook. Through all of these careers, he has labored on the multi-volume epic The Dreamlife, which he calls "an expansive transcription of gospels from the other realm and, as such, a permeable membrane into the actual dreamlife of one (hesitant) shaman, Frankie Loftus."

Asked about the inspiration for his most recent novel, Word Made Flesh, O'Connell points to his hometown. "The voices come up out of the ground," he says. "I just transcribe. In terms of inspiration, I have always agreed with Kafka's assertion that it helps to live in a haunted city."

O'Connell is currently "in the lab," at work on the road novel, Life's a Bitch: The True Adventures of Maurice & Missy, which he describes as 'Mike Ovitz and Britney Spears do Nabokov.'

A recovering transglobal amnesiac, the writer lives in a rust belt mill city in the northeast corridor of the American empire, where he is sustained, on a daily basis, by his wife and children.

Categorized as a crime novelist since his debut in 1992, O'Connell alternately embraces and rejects the label. Certainly his books draw from the standard motifs of the roman noir and the writer has admitted a "deep fondness and respect" for "the Trinity of Thompson, Goodis and Willeford." But as O'Connell says, "I'm not shy about stealing anything that rings my bell. I've yet to meet a form that didn't look ripe for pilfering."

A lifelong resident of Worcester, Mass., O'Connell has mutated that city into Quinisgamond, the setting for all his books thus far. "Q-town," according to O'Connell, "is a monstrous, teeming, surreal berg loaded with gangsters and fanatics, pilgrims and killers, lunatics and mongrels, deviants and visionaries. It's the last seat of the lost American heart. And I say that with my tongue only slightly in my cheek. It's the vault that holds all my nightmares. Q-town is what the inside of my skull looks like."

If that's true, O'Connell is surely a worrisome individual. Because within the city of Quinsigamond, life as we know it is breaking down and fragmenting. The apocalypse appears just around every corner and it is being preceded by waves of psychosis and violence that are repellent even by neo-noir standards. Humans are dosed with benzene and lit afire or flayed alive. Language itself is besieged and meaning impossible to fix.

Why the tape recorder?

Tit-for-tat, I guess.

It's impressive.

Isn't she a beauty? It's a Nagra III. It's got quite a history, or so I've been told. It was purchased new by the Italian radio and television corporation (RAI) to record the 1960 Summer Olympics in Rome. From there it made its way to Germany where a club owner named Stefan Kudel used it to record cabaret acts he was interested in booking. I bought it at a pawnshop in Panama City.

How much did you pay?

I think it was $US30 and what remained of a fifth of Leroux's blackberry brandy. The manager threw in a box of used tapes. I got them home months later and queued one up and started hearing what sounded like the office dictation of Martin Bormann. But then, I don't speak German.

Do you think the need to record your interviews is a sign of paranoia.

Could be. But the habit has come in handy in a couple of the libel suits I've brought.

Puts me right at ease, thanks so much.

I don't mean to make you uncomfortable. Roll down your window, you'll be fine.

I've never done an extended interview in a moving vehicle before.

Then it's high time.

Seriously, could we plunge in with some talk about paranoia?

We can, but I'm already suspicious of your motivations.

I'm wondering, based on my reading of your work, if you view the universe as a hostile place.

This one, yes. The others, I'm not so sure about. But I could probably make an educated guess. My position is that we're not paranoid enough. If we had a clear vision of the true scope of the malevolence around us, we'd be suitably shaken. We'd be shaken enough to start making some changes.

What kind of changes?

Internal ones, obviously. Changes in personal consciousness. Changes in how we respond to the systems of control and exploitation into which we're born. The bottom line is that that's the only option you've got, really. You can't destroy or refashion the C & E systems. And to think that you can - to believe that you can somehow organize and effect cultural, social or political change - only traps you further. Pushes you down deeper into the quicksand.

You're getting ahead of me. What systems, specifically, are you speaking of here? Who are you accusing?

I'm not accusing anyone or anything. I'm stating simple truths, as I perceive them. I'm not spreading a virus of conspiracy rhetoric here. I'm simply acknowledging my cosmology.

But could we back up? You mentioned systems of control and exploitation. Who devised these systems? Who runs them? What are their purposes?

Very good. Those are some of the exact questions we need to grapple with.

Are we discussing political systems? Economic systems? Theological systems?

Yes.

I'm sorry, which?

All of the above, certainly, and a bag of donuts on top, as the boys down San Remo like to say. We're talking, I suppose, about any assemblage, methodology or process that works on, manipulates, our perceptors, our sensory equipment and our pretence to reason, in order to alter, perhaps compose, our reality construct. Are you aware that last month, a Senate subcommittee proposed that a legal definition of "reality" be entered into the Congressional Record? Of course you're not. But you just try to check it out. It came up during a school prayer debate. Or maybe an English-as-official-language debate. I forget. The point is, one point is, you sure as hell didn't hear that tidbit from Brokaw or Rather or , did you?

I didn't. So where do you get your information? What's your news source?

In this instance? Noam Chomsky and I share the same lawn maintenance service.

I read that you suffer from chronic nightmares.

True enough. It's been a lifelong malady. I've tried all the available medications and nothing has helped. Some of the stuff has actually made the dreams worse, if you can believe it.

Are there any recurring motifs in these dreams?

Oh, they all recur. Constantly. These are serial nightmares. Really dreadful narratives. But there's something perverse in me that finds them fascinating as well as repellent and disruptive. Even though I know the cost on my immune system, there is always an impulse to go back down into the caves. There's a tiny corner of my mind that has developed a somewhat disturbing ability to step outside my emotional tumult and study these nightmares from a clinical position. And what I've found is that they read as if scripted by a hack, but a hack with an agenda and a superior learning curve. The narratives have grown since childhood, opened out and out and out, like some lotus in a Zen fable. In fact, at some point I became aware that what I experience between falling off at night and waking in the morning is a meta-nightmare, this overarching book of separate-standing but, ultimately, highly integrated books. There are generations of characters, genealogies, epic struggles, worlds folding into worlds, and all of it shot through with the same patterns and themes. What it is, I think lately, is a language that, while sounding familiar, is at present untranslatable. I need a Rosetta Stone. And that, I think, is the answer to the unasked question why do you write the books that you write? I'm trying to forge my own Rosetta Stone. I'm etching my subconscious, awkwardly, onto the cave walls of my attic in the hope that one day, before I exit, I'll read between the lines and--Eureka!--suddenly I'll be able to decipher the nightmares.

Is there any way you might tell us more about the nightmares? Would you share any specific imagery?

I can give you a list of words, for what it's worth. I keep a tablet on the nightstand and, upon waking, I simply try to scribble down some names for the rapidly fading images that have just besieged me. I've asked some friends to run these lists through various textual analyses and we're coming up with an 80-82 percent repetition rate.

Tell us some of the words, if you would.

A (clearing throat): Womb, virus, exodus, cocoon, insulation, insect, and library. That was this morning's list.

What do you make of it?

Fairly typical. Monday we had cave, hive, Nazi, corridor, snow, tank, and library.

Is it indecorous to mention your stay at the famed Blackwood Smith therapeutic facility?

Not at all. We're all about breaking down stigmas. But I will mention the standard disclaimer that a major part of my decision to, let's say, vacation there was the hospital's proximity to Lenox. I'm a big fan of Shakespeare and Company out at the old Wharton place. And of course you've got Tanglewood . . .

So you were an outpatient?

Most of the time. I could come and go as I pleased, within reason. I was free to pursue my own research as long as it didn't interfere with their experiments.

Are you permitted to speak about the nature of the experiments you allowed them to perform?

Within certain parameters. For instance, it's no secret that they've been working a long time on cortical stimulation techniques in combination with the most recent drug therapies. I took part in some of these programs. I volunteered at first. I want to be clear about that. In other words, I've brought this on myself.

(An extended pause here as the car's engine begins making ominous noises.)

The doctors began the experiments in order to lessen the nightmares. What they ended up doing was altering the nightmares. The dream narratives did not diminish, but new images, patterns, and themes were introduced. So, as you can imagine, the scope of the project shifted immediately. Suddenly, the doctors became interested in the mechanics of dream manipulation. I'll confess that this did trouble me more than a little. Because I knew some percentage of the Blackwood budget was federally derived and I could guess from which of Uncle Sam's pockets it was coming. The thought of being a prototype in a new "public shepherding" program was bothersome to say the least.

"Public shepherding"?

They know which field they want us in. They know whose grass they want us to graze. They know, very clearly they've done generational studies, haven't they? Who should breed and who should feed and when it's time for the trip to the abattoir.

What, exactly, did they do to you?

It's all a little hazy at this point in time and, remember, I'm no expert in this area. But first they brought in this neural-prosthesis specialist from the University of Alberta and she brought in a cybernetics expert specializing in rehabilitation robotics. These two worked with a neurosurgeon from Mass General to insert a series of implants into my spinal cord, optic nerve and something that Dr. Mesier called "the dream nerve." Then I got dosed with Clonazepam one week and Kloninipin the next. Immovane one week and god-almighty big doses of acetylcholine the next. And I was given all manner of phenethylamine and tryptamine derivatives. They had me hooked up to a polysomnograph for weeks at a time. Eventually, I got wise to the direction we were heading. And when I heard from a sympathetic nurse that they wanted to perform a commissorotomy on me, that's when I split. But I quickly discovered that the damage was already done. Or the blessing already bestowed. Because the final result of all this fiddling with my head was that I began having a series of waking visions. These were terrifyingly real projections and for a long period of time I was convinced they were transmissions from another place, perhaps another realm. I theorized, for a time, that the stimulation of synapses in the posterior left hemisphere, possibly in conjunction with the doses of a new drug called Alucinora, had somehow created a wound in the dimensional membrane that allowed me to "see" into another realm.

You no longer believe this?

I go back and forth. But let me ask this: don't you find it interesting and revealing that the current working model of the universe is a shape that, to my eye, closely resembles the letter "Q"?

I don't follow you.