The Resurrectionist

By Jack O'Connell

One sad day a terrible thing happened and a little boy, Danny, ended up in a coma from which he has never awoken. His father, Sweeney, has gotten his son a place at the Peck Clinic, a clinic devoted to victims of coma and which is doing cutting edge research on coma. Sweeney has also gotten a job in the clinic's pharmacy, working nights. The Peck Clinic has been in the Peck family for generations and is currently run by Dr. Peck and his physician daughter, Alice.
Before his illness, Danny was a huge fan of a comic book, Limbo, the tales of a set of runaway circus freaks, the main character of the comic being Chicken Boy, a young man covered with feathers and with beak instead of lips. He is the kind of leader of the freaks, guiding them on their travel through the visions he receives during his episodes of epilepsy. Supposedly, Chicken Boy is leading the little band to safety in a world that generally makes life hard for such as them.
Sweeney spends a lot of time with his son Danny, reading to him from the Limbo comics. Other than that, Sweeney doesn't have much of a life. He is eaten up with guilt and anger.
Sweeney gets kidnapped by a group of drug addled bikers. The bikers want to help Danny and they claim they have a drug brewed with Danny's own brain fluid that enables them to enter Danny's world. For they claim Danny has recreated in his own coma brain the comic world of Limbo and Danny is the Chicken Boy. They offer Sweeney the chance to take the drug and be with Danny if he will join their gang.

The story of Chicken Boy and the freaks in the Limbo comic is more interesting and makes more sense than that of Danny, Sweeney and the outlaw bikers. Sweeney, the Peck Clinic, the bikers and their clinic accomplice, the nurse Nadia (the brain behind the bikers), were weirder and stranger than the freaks and the cruel, heartless world of Limbo. The conclusion of the story is just creepy and unappealing. The depths that Sweeney allows himself to be drawn into don't make sense for a man who claims to love his son as much as he does. Nonetheless, this is an unforgettable story and Chicken Boy and his freak friends captured my heart. Though I didn't like the ending of the story, I did enjoy reading this book.

Review by Cathi Unsworth for The Guardian.

New Words:
Autodidact: a self-taught person. "An autodidact, he had a well-known passion for the Bible and the Bard, and Bruno hoped he wouldn't have to endure a reading from the Song of Solomon."
Gazonie: itinerant carnival and circus laborers. "The legend was that the Bedlam Brothers had started out as ordinary gazonies, signing on with a lower tier show when it passed through their hometown of Mt. Seir one summer's day."
Donniker: a rest room or toilet. "They had labored as concessionaires and cleaned up the most gruesome donnikers in the land."