The Resurrectionist

Confessions of a Comic Book Dilettante by Jack O’Connell from The Algonkian, Spring/Summer 2008

EDITOR’S NOTE: Comic books have been a part of our popular culture for decades, and in many ways they are a startlingly accurate reflection of the times in which they were written. For Jack O’Connell, author of The Resurrectionist, a lifetime of comics have inspired him to create a world filled with benign, even lovable, sideshow freaks, whose comic book story unfolds as a parallel to the “real world” of a rust-belt city in postindustrial New England.

I admit it. I’m one of those writers so enamored of fiction that I elevate its needs and its virtues and its abilities above those of history. Should I ever find a way to fashion my sedate life into a memoir, my compulsion to invent would make James Frey blush and shudder.

So, I want to insist that as a kid I was firmly lodged on the extreme and foggy cutting edge. That back in the sixties, when my peers were spinning the Monkees, I was pondering the psychedelia of Roky Erickson. That while my neighborhood buddies were lining up to see The Love Bug, I was sneaking into the balcony to witness Midnight Cowboy. And that while my pals were kicking back and reading about Superman’s latest go-round with Lex Luthor, I was awash in the mystic sputterings of Mr. Natural and the pharmacological safaris of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.

I would like to insist that all of that happened, but I’d cave and admit the truth. Or, at the very least, the closest approximation of the truth of which I’m capable.

My novel, The Resurrectionist, is chock-full of comic books. Which might lead the reader to suspect that the same could be said of my childhood. In fact, my relationship with comics while growing up was fleeting, sporadic, and haphazard. I would like nothing better than to report warm memories of readings of The Hulk and Green Lantern and The Fantastic Four. But the truth is a little more prosaic, if not less revelatory.

From about 1967 or so, the only comic book I read regularly was Treasure Chest—“the Catholic Comic Book,” as the slogan baldly proclaimed. I’ve always believed that TC was the product of a rare compromise among the black-habited nuns of my youth. I can still imagine them, encircled like Shakespearean crones around a bubbling cauldron, some ancient Mother Superior deciding All right, if they must read comic books, they’ll read our comic book!

Treasure Chest featured the wholesome adventures of Chuck White, an All-American Boy running forever through the suburbs of the American Century collecting moral lessons. Think Leave It to Beaver without the edginess. The fact is, I loved the pulpy thing in all its cheery, dogmatic glory. And to this day, there’s a box of them moldering away in my attic.

In general, comic books for me were a summertime phenomenon. But when my father walked my siblings and me up to the beachfront penny candy store, and I stood before those wire spin racks, I’m embarrassed to admit that, unlike so many of my demographic cohorts, I did not select the coolness that was Marvel or D.C. I strolled home along the boardwalk, grasping Archie and any number of imprints from the Harvey line—Sad Sack, Richie Rich, Little Lotta.

There is an almost unbearable innocence attached to my memories of these comic books. They are so utterly of another era that they feel nearly archaic to me. And in this way they stand as polar opposites to the comic book that appears repeatedly in my novel.

That comic book is called Limbo, and it tells the story of a group of circus freaks and their wanderings through a bizarre landscape in search of sanctuary from a murderous pursuer. Limbo is a dark, adult, complex story. I like to think of it as what might have developed had Kafka snuck up on The Adventures of Tintin creator Hergé, stabbed the artist to death with his own charcoal pencil, and then highjacked the story.

Which raises the question: how did I move from Treasure Chest and Richie Rich to the hermaphrodite and the mule-faced boy of the Limbo universe?

Well, let’s face it — lots of strange things happened in the eighties. And while we might want to forget many of them, I’ll always treasure the memory of strolling into a new comic book store and scoring the first issue of Mister X, Dean Motter’s short-lived but electric tale of an insomniac architect in a neon-splattered tenderloin. The comic was a trove full to bursting with all the coolest tropes — film noir, dystopian SF, Bauhaus design, German Expressionism. The story was hip, inventive, surprising, and smart. I was hooked by the checkout line.

Mister X kicked down a door for me that remains wide-open to this day, allowing a stream of rich narrative to light up my middle-aged melon. Motter’s rococo world may not have lasted long, but it gave me a gorgeous map and a hard shove into the work of Neil Gaiman and Art Spiegelman, Grant Morrison and Warren Ellis.

Beyond this, it provided the inspiration of the crucial subplot that would make The Resurrectionist a richer, deeper novel about the ways we find meaning in the most unexpected stories.

A Conversation with Jack O’Connell

What inspired The Resurrectionist?

I’d say the main source of inspiration was the book’s primary setting, known in the novel as the Peck Clinic. The Clinic is drawn from an old hospital in my hometown that sat on the crest of a hill about a half mile from my home. We walked and pedaled our bikes past this dark, ominous ark of a building that looked like no hospital we’d ever seen. It loomed over us, seemingly engulfed in a malignant aura, a heavy mansion full of angles and bows made out of ominous brown sandstone. Originally the estate of a Yankee baron with a dark imagination, it featured columns and cupolas and a never-ending roof that suggested an abundance of hidden nests and nooks. And capping it all, at the very top of the building was a great metal dome that crowned what surely must have been some insidious gothic laboratory, complete with Van de Graaff machines and unrecognizable creatures pickled in bell jars. To our kid brains, it was the perfect abode for a Victorian mad scientist with satanic ambitions. If Vincent Price ever moved into town, we knew this was where he’d take up residence.

Can you tell us about the process of writing this book?

This was the most difficult book I’ve ever written. This one took longer, went through more drafts, than anything I’ve written in the past.

Why was that?

I think the best books are the ones that really break into our consciousness and disturb the peace. The stories that insist on wrestling up things we’d rather keep hidden away and sedated. And I think the old cliché is true: if you want to evolve — as a writer or a human — there’s a need to engage your deepest, most persistent fears. At midlife, the need to do that becomes acute. Or, at least, it did for me.

The initial idea for the book came to me in a hotel room in Poitiers, France, at the ragged end of a day that had been spent trailing a friend from bistro to bistro as we talked nonstop about our mutual passion — the origins and the future of the American roman noir. That night, back in my hotel, I opened my notebook and scribbled down the bones for what I thought would be a quickly written story about Sweeney, a pharmacist from Cleveland, and Danny, his comatose, six-year-old son.

It sounds as if that initial notion evolved into something else.

I tend to develop an understanding of a book’s true concerns in the process of writing the story. But I’ve never previously experienced such a renegade. In retrospect, there were clearly some issues that my subconscious wanted, probably needed, to explore and chew on. I can recall an evolutionary moment when the book decided it wanted to be a different kind of beast, when its DNA changed. That transitional moment. The pivot. That instant when I made a small, seemingly minute move and the entire book shifted on its axis.

Can you tell us about that moment?

I was working on a simple scene: Sweeney, our protagonist, is sitting at his son’s bedside, reading from the boy’s favorite comic book. Throughout the story, I had planted this image here and there to show one of Sweeney’s last vestiges of his old, “normal” life, before the accident that caused his son’s coma. Sweeney continues to go through this motion, repeating the ritual he had shared with his boy pre-coma. Only this time, as I created the scene, I asked the questions, What is he reading? What is this comic book? Why was it Danny’s favorite? What’s the story and why did it resonate with the boy? Looking back, each of those questions was a land mine that detonated and exploded that short, simple noir tale I’d imagined at the start. The questions threw open a door into another realm. And because instinct is the novelist’s most valuable tool, I walked through that door.

Into the comic book world of Limbo?

Right. I ended up creating this substory about a wandering troupe of circus freaks. And as time went on, Sweeney’s story began to intertwine with the comic book story. There’s a lot of mirroring in The Resurrectionist between the main narrative and the freaks’ narrative. Between, we might say, real life and a fictional, dreamy realm. I can see now that I pulled Sweeney, literally, through the freaks’ story in order to effect a radical change in his consciousness. A change equivalent to the transformation that Dr. Peck would like to effect on Danny’s consciousness. And that I want to effect on the readers’ consciousness. And, finally, that the writing of the book seems to have made in my consciousness.

In what ways did writing The Resurrectionist change you?

It enlarged my perspective, I think. The process of making this book widened my sense of what identity is. Of how it evolves over time. Writing the novel gave me a bigger and clearer and more complex notion of what it means to make a family, to be a father. And, simultaneously, to be a writer. The change involves a larger, more mature perception of the tangled morality of writing itself — of making stories. Of what that process does to the writer. Of what it does to those around him. And of what it has the potential to do to, and for, the reader.

Questions for Discussion

1. In what ways does Sweeney’s story parallel the tale of the Goldfaden Carnival freaks?

2. Do you see any mirroring between characters in Sweeney’s story and those found in the Limbo story?

3. Which story line did you enjoy the most? Why? Which did you find the most meaningful? Why? Did you feel that the dual plotlines worked in conjunction with each another?

4. One interviewer felt there were no sane characters in this story. Do you agree? If not, who do you feel is sane?

5. There are several patriarchal figures in the story — Sweeney, Buzz, Bruno — and a strong matriarchal figure — Nadia Rey. What do you feel the novel has to say about the extent to which a parent or guardian will go to protect those in his or her care?

6. Who do you feel is the “resurrectionist” of the title?

7. In an interview, O’Connell has stated that the working title of the book was The Tombs. Can you recall episodes in the novel that would have evoked such a title? Do you prefer the book’s ultimate title, The Resurrectionist? Which title seems more appropriate to you and why?

8. Throughout the novel, various characters — Buzz (pages 213 and 296), the Sheep (page 237), and Nadia (page 285) — advise Sweeney to take the “leap.” What do you think they mean by this?

9. Dr. Peck’s closest relationship seems to be with his pet salamander, Rene. What do you think Rene’s purpose is in the story? What was the meaning of the poem that Peck recited to Rene in the cupola (page 148)?

10. Do you feel there is anything we can deduce about the personal history of the Abomination’s chemist, the Sheep?

11. What was the purpose of the elaborate ritual performance of Dr. Lazarus Cole’s at the Bedlam Brothers’ Roving Jubilee (page 99)?

12. What do you think triggered the violent tantrum that led to Danny’s accident?

13. Why do you think Nadia betrayed Buzz?

14. The epigraph of the book is an apology extended by Menlo, the creator of the Limbo narrative. To whom, and for what, do you feel Menlo is apologizing?

15. Do you think the ending of the book is hopeless or redemptive?