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.”

We learn little about Peck’s experimental surgeries, only -- in cartoon fashion -- that they involve bone saws, big needles and partial brain transplants. Equally cartoonish is the romance between Sweeney and Peck’s daughter, Alice, also a physician at the institute. Their first meeting to discuss Danny’s condition reads like an episode of “Short Attention Span Theater” on “Saturday Night Live.” Sweeney keeps recalling Danny’s last visit to a barbershop before his accident as Alice unveils her father’s theory that coma patients are not truly unconscious but pass through a black void to another universe of their own construction, “one that doesn’t need the prompts of touch and taste and smell and sight and sound.” Voila!: limbo. Alice and Sweeney then fall on each other like ravenous teenagers.

That Danny has somehow slipped into an alternate reality makes sense to the reader. But for Sweeney, it takes the intervention of a dead-sexy nurse, a gang of bikers, the bubbling test tubes of Peck’s brilliant exiled son and a kick in the scrotum to fully accept the truth -- and the possibilities for contact with Danny and, ultimately, redemption.

As highly colored and unlikely as Sweeney’s reality becomes, especially as it merges with “Limbo,” it somehow remains “the real world” of the novel.

In keeping with comic book conventions, O’Connell can wax philosophical in the cartoon sections, but he ultimately has to sacrifice the depth and ambiguity he lavishes on Sweeney’s world. Split between genres, this book could have been divided even more clearly, with the “Limbo” chapters rendered as a graphic novel. But O’Connell -- the cackling genius behind both worlds -- loves language. He could never cram his boisterous prose into a speech bubble, though he might relish the occasional “Zowee!” in the margins.

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.

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Regina Marler, editor of “Queer Beats: How the Beats Turned America On to Sex,” is at work on a book about the life of Edgar Allan Poe.