The Resurrectionist

The somewhat contrived-sounding premise of O’Connell’s fifth novel advances the literary noir mode of his previous work: A pharmacist, Sweeney, lands a job on the night shift at the world-renowned Peck Clinic, devoted to vegetative-state/persistent-coma patients, so that his son Danny gets the treatment that could bring him back from an accident-induced coma. Sweeney, classic hard-boiled antihero, has an anger-management problem, exacerbated by the strangeness of the clinic’s methods.

But Sweeney’s also a man working very hard at maintaining the commitment to the son he knew before the accident. He pores over his son’s favorite comic book, Limbo, and whole chapters of The Resurrectionist are devoted to the comic’s stories about circus freaks cast off on a journey of mythic proportions. Something nearly out of Limbo enters Sweeney’s life: the Abominations, a motorcycle gang led by speed-freak, master-manipulator Buzz. The dueling realities of the novel, paralleled by O’Connell’s deft conveyance of Sweeney’s conflicted humanity, combine to create a book that is hinged by its plot, like any good crime novel, but also driven forward by the fullness and uniqueness of its characters. O’Connell’s precise, occasionally purple (in the best way) prose delivers a quickening sense of inevitability to the end, where a confluence of events too spoiler-prone to name offers a potentially redemptive moment, a brief father-son reunion via the most unlikely of sources.