It's 1855, and with a war over slavery looming on the horizon all bachelor Clark Shellcross wants to do is get married. But when his hopes are dashed he succumbs to temptation and takes a weird drug that claims to change his life. And it does! He wakes up the next morning with black skin! It doesn't take long for him to realize that 1855 is not a good time to have darkly hued skin, even in the northern city of Boston. The story of his frantic odyssey in search of his former life could only have sprung from the anarchic imagination of Harry Stephen Keeler.He's arguably America's most overlooked author, a victim of a plot by the pulp publishers to seed out the writers who refused to play ball;refusing to crank out swift, crisp, easy-to-read prose for the dumbed-down masses. Instead, Harry Stephen Keeler wrote because he loved it and early on he developed a story uniquely his own. His forte was devising insanely convoluted plots involving a mixed ethnic bag of people. This is surreal pop culture of the 30's and 40s of the highest order with the added bonus of Harry's favorite MacGuffin: skulls. Harry had a penchant for skulls. Once you read a Keeler, you are never quite the same.(cover image courtesy of Kriss Szkurlatowski)