The Resurrectionist (Hardcover)

by Jack O'Connell (Author)
Key Phrases: sideshow annex, last clinic, Lazarus Cole, Alice Peck, Bruno Seboldt (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In four previous novels, Jack O'Connell has established a reputation as an author of literary-suspense and thriller-noir. This time, with The Resurrectionist, he has consolidated and surpassed that reputation with a story so mesmerizing that the reader can't figure out what is real and what's imaginary, what is threatening and what is make-believe.

The wraparound story in this multi-layered tale is about Sweeney, a pharmacist by trade, and his young son, Danny, the victim of an accident that has left him in a coma. Sweeney moves Danny to a hospital specializing in comatose patients, the Peck Clinic. The Doctors Peck, father and daughter, claim to have "resurrected" two patients from the void of deep coma. Prior to Danny's accident, he and Sweeney had been reading a fantasy series of comic books called Limbo, and it is around these stories that things get really interesting. There are circus freaks, weird stunts, an apparent "resurrection" or two, a long odyssey in search of a lost father--any number of plot lines and characters overlapping between what is real in Sweeney's life, and what might be a dream or drugged reality, and what is storybook fiction.

Alongside all the strange and convoluted events of the novel there is a compelling meditation on the power of story, the meaning of madness and sanity and the very nature of consciousness. This is more than fantasy; it is a masterful and wholly imaginative invention based on the sad reality of a father and son trying to find one another again. --Valerie Ryan

From Publishers Weekly
Two worlds wrapped tight in gloomy gothic trappings vie for dominance in this engrossing, elaborately staged exploration of consciousness from O'Connell (The Skin Palace). Sweeney, an Ohio pharmacist, brings his comatose son, Danny, to the Peck Clinic, "a sandstone monster on fifty acres of private land near Quinsigamond's western border." Danny is all Sweeney lives for; he even studies the comic book Limbo, featuring a troupe of circus freaks led by the visionary Chick the chicken boy, for what his son may have imagined when his brain functioned normally. Like Stephen King in Richard Bachman mode, O'Connell digs for darkness as Chick and his companions, who inhabit the fantasy realm of Gehenna, encounter Dr. Lazarus Cole, "The Resurrectionist" (stoned to death only to walk again) and dread the inevitable showdown with their nemesis, "the mad doctor called Fliess," in his "enormous laboratory castle, the Black Iron Clinic." Meanwhile, in the real world, cultists kidnap Sweeney in hopes of using fluid from Danny's brain to transport them all to Gehenna. This strange brew is sure to enhance O'Connell's growing cult status. (Apr.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Algonquin Books (April 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1565125762
• ISBN-13: 978-1565125766
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #133,608 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, Eerie, Unforgettable, April 28, 2008

By	Leslie Cameron (Seattle WA - USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

April 15-28, 2008

Here is the heart of "The Resurrectionist" by Jack O'Connell (page references are to the Algonquin hardbound edition):

"...he understood that the universe, the fabric of reality, was composed of nothing more than particles of longing, a kind of quantum desire for absolute connection. Dr. Peck understood that, from moment to moment, we are profoundly asleep and, so, profoundly alone. ...He knew that every arousal he achieved would bring him closer to answers that had more to do with the nature of consciousness than of coma." (143)

"...this was what he lived for: that instant of pure, galloping potential, that feeling of downrushing epiphany. ...But calling forth fresh thought was, like summoning demons, a precarious process. And, for Dr. Peck, it required an instinctual blending of the right amounts of whimsy, research, fatigue, daydream, alcohol, and stress. It also required the right environment.... Finally, the summoning required a marriage of humility and patience that could allow the idea to reveal itself in its own manner and time. The idea, it must be understood, is always in charge." (145-146)

"...the calling to medicine -- at least the kind of visionary medicine to which he aspired -- was more than a vocation; it was destiny. And as such, it called for a radical lifestyle. Doctors, like monks, were forever at risk of infiltration by the domestic world. He concluded... that they should be solitary, if not entirely celibate, creatures. ...set apart." (146-147)

As in his earlier work, "Word Made Flesh," O'Connell has staked his claim on the phenomenon of creativity and developed a glossus of images to convey his theories and exasperations. He begins Word with the closely observed vivisection of a man, a reverse process of the title, in which we watch a mind (such as it was), and instincts and feelings (such as they were) deftly divested of their mortal envelope, their "jacket" of flesh. From there, somehow, inexorably and beautifully, we are led to apples, and you know what they stand for.

In "The Resurrectionist," we're given a boy in a coma, his grieving father whose wife -- the boy's mother -- died six months after the boy's "incident." We're given a creepy private hospital in O'Connell's perturbingly passé Quinsigamond (Worcester), Massachusetts, said hospital staffed by incestuous strangers in a suffocating atmosphere of endless waiting.

Time is made of glass here. There's motion, but it takes years to make a single ripple. It might all be a metaphor for the giant brain we famously use only ten percent of, a brain that is "from moment to moment... profoundly asleep and, so, profoundly alone."

The chief creep, Dr. Peck, is chasing "arousal" of his comatose patients, seeking that one brilliant insight -- his own arousal -- like a deep-sea diver in the murk of our still primitive sciences of mind and thought. O'Connell's work is rich with wry and mordant humor, and he has his questing doctor literally using a diver's torch to examine the film of the sleeping boy's brain.

Interleaved with all this are slices of a comic-book saga, Limbo, that frames out into a sort of Carnivàle with a twisted trot (i.e., student guide), linking the Limbo circus freaks to the characters at the Peck Clinic. It works because of two qualities in Mr. O'Connell's fiction.

There is the sort of honesty that seems larger than the work that contains it, as if it were a billowing mantle or a prophetic migraine, and it wouldn't surprise me to hear Mr. O'Connell borrow Stravinsky's famous line about being the "vessel through which [these stories] passed."

(Since I wrote these words, I heard Mr. O'Connell speak about the creative process, and he said it's both craft and inspiration, hard work and mystical, galvanizing energy.)

The second quality is the emotional and psychological credentials Mr. O'Connell gives his characters. Sweeney, the sleeping boy's father, has an anger problem. He acts out, violently and sometimes ludicrously (there again is Mr. O'Connell's IQ-crunching humor). Dr. Alice Peck, creepy Dr. Peck's daughter and clinical associate, kisses the boy on his forehead and ruffles his downy hair with the back of her fingers, saying it's "like silk. I love it at this age." And she's "crazy for kids."

There are hard caroms off a crooked wall, too, like the bikers (the mind's id locked in vampiric coitus with the ego's daylight tyrannies?) and an old guy at an ancient pre-mall-era "Mart" who cooks burgers and hates life. There's Romeo the janitor and Nurse Nadia Rey at the clinic -- no relation (ha!) to Nadja the lobster girl in Limbo.

And lying curled on their sides or flat on their backs, intubated, hands locked by shrunken tendons in the classic "pugilistic" pose, their heads shaved bald or carefully coiffed, there are -- centrally and forever -- the sleepers, locked in the mysteries rippling under human consciousness, marine beings waiting for Dr. Peck's flashing, lancing light.

This is a novel that makes the reader think and puzzle and mull, and every strange and beautiful thing in it exerts a Mariner-like hold on the mind. Mr. O'Connell's stories hit the ramp on two wheels and crown the curve at escape velocity. Just go with `em.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars clotho's threads, April 22, 2008

By	David W. Straight (knoxville, tennessee United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a strange book--a roller-coaster ride through a fun house, up and down, in and out of the light. I certainly will keep you off-balance. We have 4 basic threads woven together. First, the pharmacist Sweeney and his comatose son Danny, newly-arrived at the Peck Clinic in O'Connell's decaying city Quinsigamond. Second, and not as extensive as the other threads, is Peck himself, his daughter, and his pet salamander. Third is Buzz Cote's biker gang The Abominations, including Nadia Rey, who works at the clinic. Fourth is a comic-book (using the term loosely, since it's unlike any comic most of us will ever read) world of Limbo, Gehanna, and circus freaks. Danny was/is[??] a huge fan of Limbo, as are the Abominations.

Initially, everything seems rather straightforward and distinct, but Clotho weaves these threads together so that the distinctions begin to blur, and then blur in a major way indeed. You'll find that by the end of the book, things are very different from what you thought they were, and you may have a hard time trying to separate reality (such as there is) from fantasy. But you'll also find that the ending seems to make perfect sense, in a bizarre and convoluted way.

O'Connell is able to draw a picture of a fascinating world. It's a very different world--unsettling, disturbing, jugular. It's strong and effective writing, and it resembles some sort of odd underground comic without pictures. Powerful stuff!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The joys of genre, December 12, 2008

By	Ashley Crawford "Ashley Crawford" (Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

It intrigues me that two people can read one book and have such stunningly different experiences. While I would be the first to admit that The Resurrectionist is a roller-coaster pot pouri of styles and characters I would take that as a blessing rather than a curse.

To be sure, in his four previous novels O'Connell has been guilty of flaying a man alive in visceral prose and a bout of dwarf throwing. He has also brought us some of the most riveting prose in contemporary American literature, managing to combine highly cerebral ideas with riveting narrative structures.

I have recently read three blog critiques which have left me wondering about the Giordian knot that O'Connell has entangled himself in by simply being ambitious. They have also left me wondering about the cognitive abilities of certain readers. Thus this missive is directed at G.B.H. Hornswoggler (who, just via his/her presumed pseudonym is probably not to be taken too seriously), Carrie Laben and Mike Meginnis (who, in his blog, admits that "I'm not writing in order to be a productive critic..."). All three have taken a sledgehammer to The Resurrectionist and all three, I believe, read a very different book to the one I have now delved into twice with total relish.

It is more than a little difficult to contextualize O'Connell's writings. He's become, deservedly, something of a cult [and sadly I have to stress cult] favourite via his first four books, The Skin Palace, Box Nine, Wireless and Word Made Flesh - all of which I can heartily recommend as well. These were all categorized as `crime' novels, which didn't even start to encompass their bizarre depths. With The Resurrectionist he has made categorization even more impossible by blending psychology, comic book culture, crime, 50s noir and parental despair.

The New York Times Book Review stated that: "To call Jack O'Connell's novels imaginative, or even original, doesn't begin to say it... There's something both exciting and unnerving about [his] kind of hallucinatory writing." The Los Angeles Times claimed that: "O'Connell [is a] cackling genius. . . . Fans of his previous novels, the cult favorites The Skin Palace, Box Nine and Wireless, will be glad to hear that The Resurrectionist is just as demented and deeply enjoyable." Meanwhile the Minneapolis Star-Tribune claims that: "It blends the out-there mysticism of H.P. Lovecraft, the dark corridors and femme fatales of Dashiell Hammett, and the pulpy, lurid qualities of '50s comic books."

I read this book some months ago and find every morning that I am sipping a coffee and staring at its spine with something close to awe. Its slippery position in terms of genre is part of the intrigue - should it sit between William Gibson's Spook Country and James Ellroy's Cold Six Thousand? Or, in its clear nod to horror should it snuggle up against Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves? Or, in its' decidedly sensitive investigation into notions of loss should it sit between Steve Erickson's Our Ecstatic Days and Cormac McCarthy's The Road? Or, in its homage to comic culture should it be somewhere between Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude and Charles Burns' Black Hole?

You see the problem I'm having here. O'Connell embraces so many genre attributes that he is impossible to pin down. The Resurrectionist is borderline surrealist fantasy, crime writing at its best, horror story and a moving tale of love and loss and sex and violence. My rambling list of comparisons are amongst my favourite books of recent years and it intrigues me that while Gibson may be raking in the cash, writers such as O'Connell and Steve Erickson remain trapped in a somnambulistic nether world of contemporary literature.
Genre-placement is dangerous stuff, as I became aware to my great chagrin when the mother of an ex-fiancé gave me Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy one birthday. I sniffed and put it aside. Westerns? Not my cup of tea I decided rather rashly. Was I dead wrong? Absolutely. Years later I would discover Child of God and, from there, circle back to the Border Trilogy. McCarthy is his own genre pure and simple. Biblical, potent, nasty, unwavering works of literature indeed.

Is Ellroy's Cold Six Thousand simply `crime'? Is Danielewski's House of Leaves simply `horror'? And for those who loathe science fiction, they are missing out on the visionary pursuits of such writers as Phil Dick and J.G. Ballard.

Of course the adverse is also true, as is clearly seen with O'Connell and Erickson. Genre guarantees at least a niche. Books such as The Resurrectionist or Our Ecstatic Days are, quite simply, impossible to categorize. O'Connell's first four novels were promoted as crime, indeed, the earlier ones were published by Mysterious Press. This would have garnered him a niche market, but much of his work is far more cerebral than your average crime novel. Suddenly shift him to a publisher such as Algonquin and his average reader will no doubt be thrown off balance.

Genre is, of course, all about marketing. Some authors have enormous luck with such marketing - William Gibson with Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson with Snow Crash lucked out with `Cyberpunk' masterpieces, but both books were far more curious than the average sci-fi book. Both investigated notions of religiosity and hermeneutics in their pages, but once an author is `placed' the audience follows. Stephenson's Cryptonomicon and Gibson's last few books could hardly be described as Cyberpunk.

Like Gibson and Stephenson, O'Connell has inserted many broader elements into his novels. Hermeneutics and the evolution of linguistics runs like a river through Word Made Flesh, just as it does in Snow Crash. An obsession with cinema is shared by O'Connell's The Skin Palace and Steve Erickson's most recent foray, Zeroville.

There has been at least one blogger who seemed confused by O'Connell's narrative shifts in The Resurrectionist. Interestingly O'Connell has taken on a not dissimilar approach to Alan Moore in Watchmen, in which Moore peppered the comic-book narrative with various texts, including, in a moment of sheer inspiration, psychiatric evaluations of his characters. Both books shift back and forth between the `comic' narrative and `reality.'

Comics are of course central to another of O'Connell's peers, Jonathan Lethem in his Fortress of Solitude. Lethem is another writer who has avoided easy categorization as a genre writer. Starting out with Philip K. Dick inspired sci-fi mixed with a touch of Sam Peckinpah and Chandler, Lethem found some kind of mainstream acceptance with his marvelous Motherless Brooklyn. But Lethem is, at heart, a more gentle writer than Erickson or O'Connell (I suspect a girlfriend left me because I recommended Erickson's Arc d'X to her).

The New York Times review of The Resurrectionist was placed under their Crime review section. This, to me, was akin to placing McCarthy's The Road under Westerns or Erickson's Days Between Stations under Science Fiction. Genre is a tricky business indeed. O'Connell has flown high above easy categorization with his Resurrectionist - will a new audience fly with him?