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From the beginning, in 1881, when an unemployed laborer, on a bet, attempts to copulate with an electricty generator, to the end, when an unemployed executioner who specialized in electric chairs fantasizes about electrically-enhanced sex with a prostitute, Electric Flesh runs an alternating current of language through the body of America.

The central protagonist of Electric Flesh, however, is Harry Houdini, both as the historical figure himself, and as an idea�specifically Howard Hordinary's conviction that he is the bastard grandchild of a rumored liaison between Houdini and Charmain London (Jack London's wife). Howard, tormented by multiple perversities�particularly sex and electricity�his unemployment and powerlessness, schemes to restore his status (as executionar, as Houdini grandchild). Cycling back and forth between Hordinary's present, and the fantastical Houdini past, populated by freaks, carnies, scientists, con men, lunatics. Momentarily confined by cages and straitjackets, Houdini ranges all over the world and, much has Hordinary is obsessed with Houdini, Houdini in turn is obsessed with *SZUSZU*, the enigmatic "Electric Girl," with whom he shared billing early in his career.

Combining the compressed violence of a Dennis Cooper novel, with the paranoid historical sweep of Pynchon and Vollman, and the linguistic experiments of Ben Marcus, Brian Evenson, and Matthew Derby, Claro is very much an American writer who will finally be discovered by his true audience.

Claro is the author of ten novels in French and has translated into French the works of America's leading novelists--Thomas Pynchon, William Vollman, Ben Marcus, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, John Barth, Harold Jaffe, Mark Leyner--and such international writers as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. He lives in Paris with his wife, film director Marion Laine, and their four children.

Translated by Brian Evenson (Providence, RI) Brian Evenson is the author of six books of fiction: Altmann's Tongue (Bison Books, 2002), The Din of Celestial Birds (Wordcraft, 1997), Prophets and Brothers (Rodent 1997), Father of Lies (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998), Contagion (Wordcraft, 2000), and Dark Property (Black Square/Hammer Books/Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002). He received an O. Henry Award for his story "Two Brothers" and has twice received O. Henry honorable mentions. He now teaches in the creative writing program at Brown University.

From Chapter Three: Dismemberment of Disgrace
A year later, Harry had another revelation. It was in 1884, he was ten years old, a circus had just set its big top in his city. Before his eyes a magician made aces spring up at the ends of his fingers, freed rings which resembled those his mother hid under her dress, then droned out solved equations like rabbit droppings.
Samuel R. Lynn, also called The Great Merlynn.
Ladies and gentlemen I ask you for the greatest attentiveness and the modest price of your na�vete eight pence thank you.
Zim-boom
In the first row the kids pinched each other and rubbed their knees against the wood of the platform. Jack Hoeffler, the local wino, threw his head back and let loose a yee-haw thick with hacked up snot. The silence matured bit by bit out of giggles and the scraping of chairs. Outside a dog barked. The Incredible Merlynn pulled up his sleeves, revealing laudanum-swollen forearms, and let his eyelids construct an inspired look. He cast an eye to the right toward the young girl of thirteen who, in tights and swimsuit, moved from one foot to the other as if to tamp down a platform that was threatening to warp. Profiting from the shift of public attention to the girl's thighs, Merlynn gave a shake to his left cuff, a shake which, reverberating in imperceptible waves along his tensed muscles, dislodged some mechanism situated upstream from his elbow. At the other end of the stage, a clock struck twice, ding, making all the gazes swivel, dong. The diversion lasted only a sliver of a slowly spinning second. From the hands of the great Merlynn spurted eleven red roses, where a moment before only a little black velvet had frothed.
The child who Harry then was demanded from his memory the exact architecture of these tangled gestures; he tried to restore the chronology disrupted by the girl in the green swimsuit, forcing himself mentally to augment the contrast between the black of the impression of the sleeve and the white of the silences. But a coarse power held it back, he was just stirring up muddy faces, didn't succeed in shaking up the cripple coughing with impatience behind him. Scheise, he whispered, I'm going about it wrong. But when Merlynn performed the next act, that of the Severed Body, Harry tensed all that he had to tense and didn't miss a bit: he folded the girl into her swimsuit, the swimsuit into the scenery, transformed the clock into stone and hammered the two nails of his eyes into the hands of the magician. Then time cracked very tenderly and its lines became points, its angles curves. Inverted by the lens of his tension, a sort of anatomical cutaway danced for him the chaconne of illusion. He saw the black bottom sway its hips, the mutilation table roll millimeter by millimeter, the false limbs slide onto the numb arms of the fettered victim, he heard the rubbing of felt on fabric, the rolling of joints within the flesh of the elbows and the phalanges, heard the elastic snap under the sleeve and the wire vibrate against the wrist�but, of course, he no longer saw the surprise, the miracle, no longer felt terror, even disguised. So he waited for the third act, that of the saber, to compel his vision into a rhythm at once slower and less cadaverous. The cutaway Lynn had briefly been metamorphosed into a carefully made-up automaton, warped in a subtle outfit, working in jerks and glides. Harry/Ehrich let the ding and the dong of the clock reverberate so that the stage again became a vibrating eardrum, and translated each of the words supposed to divert attention from the cover up into musical notes, without deforming the impact which he had with great pains opened up. Which made Lynn seem more like his father deboning a fowl or punishing his older brother. At the same time, there occurred a curious compression in his bowels, a bubble popped, blood which he didn't recognize streaked an organ which he was completely ignorant of, or nearly so, the surface of his skin cracked, the nape of his neck tensed. Having approached him without anyone else's knowledge, the girl in the green swimsuit released her name into the well of his ear: *SZUSZU*. A name which fell straitly and firmly into his ear without brushing against its walls, a pebble perfectly shaping around him the tube of silence until a pedestal rises up within him from out of nowhere and lets itself be marked with a seal�underwear soaked, he went back home, understanding that a magician's life was composed of noises and leakages, of minute obscenities concealed in the folds of his palm, of keys, terrors, kept hungers. A lesson that would have to be transformed into a destiny, at the very least.
Henceforward, the girl in the green swimsuit didn't stop expanding under his sheets like vegetative evidence that needed to be constantly watered by tears and other spurts. She became the fluid of illusion itself, the necessary impetus for the brutal metamorphoses, the spring-latch holding down the trapdoor of surprise, the prestidigital beyond of his destiny, his discontinuous cum generator. Beginning the next day, he paced the streets of Appleton searching for her shadow. But Lynn had struck camp, leaving as the only vestiges the sawdust of his stuffed wildcats and the grass trampled by Unthan, the Armless Wonder, the ogre with neither arms nor bad temper who played the violin with his feet, flooding the audience with the funereal strains of Asleep in the Deep, that freaks' hymn which recounts the mortal agony of a sword swallower abandoned by a snake woman, and swallow he will, thousands of knives, alone in his hive, like a bee that swirls, for she left him in a swoon, leaving him not a single spoon, and with him we all weep, asleep in the deep, asleep in the deep�