Jack O’Connell’s The Resurrectionist starts out standard
enough—in a book club sort of way—with a man, Sweeney, who
is dealing with the rage and guilt of losing his six-year-old son to a
coma and then his wife to suicide. But, holy hell, things get weird
fast. Enter Nadia, a femme fatale nurse who’s the matriarch of a gang
of murderous bikers who steal coma victims’ brain juices. Then The
Resurrectionist gets really strange with tales of strongmen,
death-defying magicians, and a troupe of freaks led by a chicken boy.
It’s an extraordinary journey that O’Connell provides, an engaging dark
trek through consciousness.
Young Danny is in a persistent coma after an accident, so Sweeney
takes a job in the mysterious, isolated Peck Clinic in order to watch
over his son. Director Dr. Peck, a man who “looked as if his
grandfather had owned the most efficient general store on the prairie,”
claims he can resurrect patients from vegetative states, but it seems
that Danny is lost in Limbo, a comic book he was reading at the
time of his accident. Sweeney finds himself rereading this comic
series, desperately trying to understand its complex narrative, in
which a band of exiled sideshow freaks travel the old-world countryside
in search of a home. The Goldfaden Freaks are led by the pure-hearted
chicken boy, Chick, who is searching for his father in a land of limbo
and feverish seizures.
Meanwhile, Sweeney is eventually kidnapped from the clinic by Nadia
and the bikers, who take him to an abandoned prosthetics factory.
There, they cook the “Soup,” a brain-altering drug made from the
aforementioned brain juices, which allows Sweeney to enter the land of
Limbo and possibly find Danny, and save Chick from a villainous
magician who is hunting them down. Phew, I told you things got
weird.
These disparate stories and settings dance around each other in
O’Connell’s novel, forming a thick stew of intrigue. The
Resurrectionist is an effortless read, chockablock with film noir
twists and ideas about different states of consciousness. Imagine the
creepy horror and fascination you first felt after reading Ray
Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes; you’ll have a good
idea how an entire afternoon slipped out of your control and you got
lost in O’Connell’s limbo.