Schickler burst onto the literary scene in summer 2000 with publication of his short story "The Smoker" in The New Yorker.
Schickler employs darkness, mythology, Middle Ages mysticism, medieval rites of passage and bestiality to portray a modern New York full of profoundly lonely thirtysomethings finding love and redemption in the oddest of circumstances.
While "kissing in Manhattan" is a mixed metaphor for vanity that leads to loneliness, and brooding shyness that yields greater rewards, the novel is overpopulated by raw sexuality, fantasies involving bondage, domination, beast-men and lucky charms as Schickler slyly references nearly thirty mythological characters and locals, and actively unites humans and animals.
Schickler's characters are nothing if not hellbent for legend, looking for redemption from their ordinary problems in the dark whirl of a mythical unreal city.
Instead, Schickler trails this dreary junior vampire through a priest's confessional and a hastily sketched love triangle to an absurdly melodramatic ending, proving the rule that if there's a gun strapped to a stock trader's chest in the first act it is going to go off in the third.
Schickler is a writer of brisk and quirky sentences, and the weird jumble of elements he puts into play sometimes adds up to something memorable.
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