A comatose son in a comic book world

Jack O'CONNELL'S "The Resurrectionist" is a novel of two realms that overlap and pucker like a Cub Scout project: "real life" in a gloomy, family-run asylum for coma patients and the fantasy world of the comic book series "Limbo," in which a wandering gaggle of outcast circus freaks follows the inspirations of its visionary Chicken Boy. Sedate it ain't. Forty pages in, you've seen a neck-snapping, a stabbing and a stolen fetus glimmering wetly in the bottom of a satchel. It seems trifling to mention the vomiting on Page 8.

At the emotional root of these garish events is a young boy's brain injury. A year after the accident that put Danny beyond reach, his father, Sweeney, brings him to the mysterious but highly regarded Peck Institute, renowned for its two recorded arousals from coma (although one of those patients died a week later). Dr. Peck not only accepts Danny as his patient but also hires the half- unhinged, recently widowed father as third-shift pharmacist and provides a substandard basement apartment for him. Now Sweeney can structure his days and his long, mostly sleepless nights around Danny.

Of course, Sweeney has read the medical literature. He doesn't think his 8-year-old boy is "sleeping" or that he dreams, but he does believe, on some level, that Danny can hear him. He curls beside the inert child and reads him episodes of "Limbo," trying to decipher the confusing world that had so engaged Danny before his accident.

Until the parallels between Sweeney's reality and "Limbo" begin to surface, the transitions are jarring. Either you'll cling to Sweeney and the thrillingly Gothic Peck Institute -- imagine it as drawn by Edward Gorey -- or you'll cling to "Limbo," where the freaks travel under the protection of the Strong Man and the loving care of Durga, the Fat Lady.

There is a tentacle of connection between Sweeney's reality and "Limbo" in Peck's private musings. ("We are mapping the location of the human mind," he imagines telling colleagues. "And our maps are not aligning with the received wisdom.") A megalomaniacal genius with an iron grip on power at the institute, Peck has sussed out Danny's promise for treatment as well as Sweeney's vulnerability: "[T]he father, the pharmacist, was the perfect profile -- devoted and unstable, desperate and drowning in guilt. The man was pliable and would be easily convinced. The trick was always to give them more hope than information."