Skels: A Novel

by Maggie Dubris

When Orlie Breton shows up in June of 1979 to work as a paramedic in New York City’s 911 system, she finds herself plunged into a violent and magical world, populated by medics who are not terribly different from the homeless people—the "skels"—who comprise most of their patient population.

Orlie draws parallels between her experiences to the stories and feelings represented in the works of her favorite writers, including Jack London, Walt Whitman, Rimbaud, and Mark Twain. Skels was written with the question in mind of what would happen if the ambulance world really was permeated with the works of past writers, and the skels were carrying the consciousnesses of the writers themselves. What would the protagonist have done if she had met the greatest poet of all, dirty and covered with lice, and been granted the chance to save him? Not from dying, but from his own life. With Skels Dubris shares what she saw during her own time as an EMT— not literally, but more importantaly, how she felt in her soul, magical and violent and funny, filled with passion, and like it contained some ancient element that was invisible from the outside.

Genres: Fiction

260 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Maggie Dubris is a writer and musician who lives in New York City. She worked from 1980-2007 as a 911 paramedic, and much of her work is drawn from those
experiences. She now works as an on-set paramedic for film and television, studies martial arts, and does both urban and rural field recording. Her new book, BrokeDown Palace, will be coming out from Subpress in 2019. It's a mixed-genre story of St. Clare's, the hospital she was based in, and of New York City in the center of the AIDS epidemic and the violence of the crack years. She also responded to the World Trade Center disaster on September 11, and documents that experience in the book.

Reviews

[Rand]

As a narrative, this was not my cup of tea—guess I read it at the wrong time.

However the style was at times engaging and the story interesting enough to make me read *most* of it though I must admit that I skipped around a bit and probably missed the one crucial part where everything clicks—kind of like when you're at a basement show and trying to put out your cigarette while getting your camera ready to take more photos and you notice that someone is crowd-surfing and instead of helping hoist the friend aloft so to extend the moment you fiddle with the camera longer and end up not setting up the shot right and your film doesn't develop right and the surfer is, in every way, let down. Then the next day you see that someone else managed to snag the perfect shot anyway, which was digital, and your entire selfish desire to be the one to catalogue the moment was made redundant so you squeeze the memory into a place it does not quite fit, like a review for a book you didn't give enough of a chance because you weren't as into 1970s NYC as you thought but really just wanted more monies to take shitty pictures and smoke too many cigarettes.

Fun fact: "skels" has a Latin root in "scelus", meaning a wicked deed or wickedness which progressed into the Dutch "schelm" (as in a reprobate). First appearance of this word/concept in English is "skelder" meaning (a professional con) which shares the same sound as the Old Norse 'skjoldur' —meaning "shield-maker"— which in turn brings us to the protective/spooky/morbid composite contained in "skeleton".

[Matthew Gallaway · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone who's too young to have experience much of 'old New York' (circa 1979) but old enough to romanticize it, I found this book to be a perfect window into a period of time when the city was more chaotic, beautiful, and (under the despair) forgiving.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second Dubris book I've read, and for my money, one of the best living novelists.

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://www.examiner.com/books-in-denv...

[Tom Leland · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you know how lost and scuzzy NYC was in the 70s/early 80s, and can imagine writings by someone who was an ambulance media in the city at that time, you know there's mind-boggling stuff here.

[Maggie Dubris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, since I wrote this I like it. Brings back being a medic in the early 80s NYC to me, even though the story itself is fiction.

[Meredith · Rating 2 out of 5]

Narration is interesting at points, then veers irritatingly naive at others. There is something in these moments of naivete that hints at a frightening mono-dimensionality. Interesting representations of life in late 70's Manhattan are present but, damn, the narrator's flatness was impossible for me to look / read past. I barely finished it.

[Ann M · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great read, tho not technically perfect. It takes awhile to get going, but it's evocative and noir and hip and it made me laugh.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ambulance scenes were riveting but the rest of the story was rather lackluster and surreal.