This book is filled with nightmare and horror, but also, along the way, it is embued with a sense of resurrection and spirituality, and that transformation happens so slowly, but works in a magical way. From loser to an almost Jesus figure, Collins lets us glimpse the sadness and despair of modern life, to just how close people come to the edge, but pull back. It is truly a challenging and haunting novel.Debated for hours, with its champions and detractors, we did arrive at consensus, that is a book unlike others we have recently read in a long time.
At the heart of the novel is a mystery. Frank Cassidy is a guy whose station in life is defined by a dead-end job at the near bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. He is mired in an unhappy life with a wife, Honey, and two kids, Robert Lee and Ernie.
Frank has suffered terrible trauma as a child. He has witnessed his parents burning to death in a fire thirty years ago and the scars from the incident run deep. "The way I saw it in life, there were only two states," Frank explains, "either you're trying to recapture the past or trying to escape the past." When Frank learns from a newspaper that his uncle is dead, that past comes chasing after him. Frank decides to leave his job and life in New Jersey and move his family up north to Michigan to (if nothing else), lay some claims on the family farm. Desperately poor, Frank manages to ferry his family to Michigan using a series of stolen cars.
Once in small town Michigan, Frank discovers that explaining the past might not come easy, especially when there are so many unanswered questions. His uncle has been shot, but by whom? The alleged killer hangs himself and lies in a state of permanent coma. What was the killer's (The Sleeper's) motive? Why is Norman, Frank's brother, slowly losing his mind? To answer these, Frank must exercise his own demons and confront some tough answers.
Frank's wife, Honey, in the meantime, has issues of her own. Her ex-husband, Ken, is on death row. She and his son Robert Lee try to cope with the impending loss in ways unique to their respective personalities.
Collins has set The Resurrectionists in the America of the late seventies. The Watergate hearings and Skylab form essential background here. Frank and his family spend most of their waking hours watching endless reruns on television. The reruns serve as an excellent metaphor of the cultural stasis of American life in those times.
At a broader level, the novel hints at Biblical overtones set in very contemporary settings. Frank of course, is a "resurrectionist" coming back to take control of his past. "There was something prophetic about all of it," Frank says when he drives back to Michigan from New Jersey. "Like beginning a journey across the river Styx to the land of the dead, a journey back to the center of things, to secrets I had not let myself think about in years."
Collins is a master at painting pictures of small town American life-the diners, a snowbound campus, even a highway rest stop at McDonalds. The images are searing.
Apart from the wonderful storyline, the one mighty plus for The Resurrectionists is Collins's absolutely brilliant pacing of the plot. The book is wonderfully engrossing and surprises are thrown at you right until the breathtaking end. The Resurrectionists might be called a mystery novel, but it really is so much more than that. It is a book that will hold your attention right till the very last page.