O'Brien, Matthew (Matt O'Brien)

PERSONAL:

Born in Washington, DC.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Las Vegas, NV. E-mail—thesewersofparis@yahoo.com.

CAREER:

Writer and journalist.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Nevada Press Association's Better Newspaper Contest, Journalist of Merit, 2002, Outstanding Journalist, 2006; Nevada Arts Council fellowship grant, 2008, for an excerpt from Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas.

WRITINGS:

Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas, photos by Danny Mollohan, Huntington (Las Vegas, NV), 2007.

Contributor of nonfiction to periodicals, including Las Vegas Life, Las Vegas Review-Journal, High Country News, Reno News & Review, Tucson Weekly, Denver Post, and CityLife; fiction has been published in periodicals, including the Red Rock Review, and in anthologies, including In the Shadow of the Strip, University of Nevada Press.

SIDELIGHTS:

Matthew O'Brien is a writer and journalist whose book Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas focuses on the drains and sewers of Las Vegas, Nevada, and the people who live in them. "It all started in the summer of 2002, when I explored five storm drains with City Life contributor Joshua Ellis," writes the author in an article on the CityLife Web site. "It culminated in the summer of 2004, when I took a sabbatical from City Life and explored the flood-control system in full. It continued through 2006, as I returned to the drains for follow-up notes and to explore virgin tunnels."

The original idea came to O'Brien when he wrote a story about Timmy "T.J." Weber, who brutally raped his girlfriend's fourteen-year-old daughter and then killed his girlfriend and one of her sons. He escaped the police barricade by crawling through storm drains. "A morbid curiosity drew me to the ditch," O'Brien notes in a CityLife article he wrote. "I wondered what Weber experienced in the storm-drain system. What he saw, what he heard, what he smelled." In a review on the Austin Chronicle Web site, Shawn Badgley commented: "What results is an anecdotal study five years in the making, full of unfiltered interviews and first-person accounts, regional detail and dry humor, and historical context and a storyteller's sense of timing."

Illustrated with photos by Danny Mollohan, the book introduces readers to Vietnam veterans, drug addicts, and many other denizens of the drains. O'Brien describes the "wonders to be found, … including a woman who came all the way to Vegas just to bring gifts to her tunnel-dweller son," wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The author also writes of the graffiti art gallery that he finds and details the dangers of living in the sewer system, including getting drowned in floodwater that can rise a foot a minute in heavy storms. He also discovers the stories of how many of the people who live there ended up in the sewers of Las Vegas and contrasts these tales with the casino life that sparkles above them.

Reviewers generally praised Beneath the Neon, with the Austin Chronicle's Badgley commending the author for getting out of the office to discover the story, ignoring a trend by modern journalists to get all their information electronically. A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that the author "writes with a noirish flair," adding that "his compassion is … evident as he illuminates the lives of these … subterranean dwellers."