Product Description

The solitude of the Upper Michigan Peninsula is Michael Collins’s heart of darkness in this compelling story of the unquiet dead. Frank Cassidy’s parents burned to death almost thirty years ago; now his uncle is dead—shot by a mysterious stranger who lies in a coma in the local hospital. Frank, working menial jobs to support his unfaithful wife and two children, heads north in a series of stolen cars to dispute his cousin’s claim to the family farm. Once there, Frank wants answers, but realizes that what he is searching for—and the promise of the American Dream—is quickly receding from his grasp. Brilliant and unsettling, The Resurrectionists is an ironic yet chilling display of American culture in the seventies and a compassionate novel about a man struggling to overcome the crimes and burdens of his past.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1348489 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From Publishers Weekly
I couldnt quite get us back without incident for the burial of my father. We ran into a little trouble along the way. It took us two stolen cars along the interstate to get us home. Collins, an Irish-American writer whose last novel, The Keepers of Truth, was shortlisted for the Booker, has perfected the art of beginning a novel, as the sentences above attest. The year is 1979, and narrator Frank Cassidy is stuck in a dead end job in New Jersey. Orphaned at the age of five when his parents were burnt to death in a fire, Frank is still haunted by his past and fights off fits of clinical depression. He's married to Honey and has two kids, 14-year-old Robert Lee and five-year-old Ernie. Robert Lee is actually the son of Honeys first husband, a murderer now on death row. When Frank discovers by chance that his adoptive father, Ward Cassidy, was shot and killed on his farm in Cooper, Mich., he packs up the family and returns to his hometown, in spite of his stepbrother Normans advice not to come. With little to return to in New Jersey, the family decides to stay in Cooper for a while. Frank gets a job in security at a local college and in his spare time investigates the link between the mystery of Wards murder and the mysteries surrounding his own early life. The connection seems to hinge on the identity of Wards murderer. Is he really Chester Green, the presumably long dead son of a local farmer? (And why would Chester kill Ward?) Contrary to Scott Fitzgeralds oft-repeated dictum that there are no second acts in American life, Collins shows that second acts are what America is all about: for all the battered existences on display in this novel, there's a faith, a persistent optimism, that lifts them above the tawdriness of their details.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
A newspaper headline "Farmer murdered by mystery man" triggers a chain of events narrated by Frank Cassidy, the quintessential unreliable witness. From the age of five, when he was traumatized by the burning death of his parents, Frank was raised by his uncle Ward, who led him to wonder whether he may have been responsible for starting the blaze. Subsequent therapy and hypnosis only deepen the mystery and lead to Frank's eventual breakdown, hospitalization, and electroshock therapy, further muddying his own memory of events. After reading the newspaper account of his uncle's murder, Frank, accompanied by his wife and sons, returns to Michigan, robbing and stealing along the way, in a make-or-break attempt to solve the murder, reclaim the family farm, and uncover long-buried family secrets. While the putative killer and only witness to the murder lies in a coma, his doctor (Frank's former therapist) suspects that he has "locked-in syndrome" and may be able to communicate what he knows. Against a backdrop of 1970s television, from Police Woman to Starsky and Hutch, suspense builds to a heart-stopping conclusion. This tension-filled page-turner by the Booker Prize-nominated Collins (The Keepers of Truth) is recommended for most public libraries. Barbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Although the plot may be convoluted and less than credible, the narrative voice here is completely distinctive and slightly unhinged. Collins (The Keepers of Truth, 2001) is an Irish expatriate, and his take on blue-collar America in the 1970s is unsettling. When Frank Cassidy learns that his uncle Ward has been murdered and the suspect is in a coma, he uproots his family and heads home to the Upper Peninsula in Michigan via a series of stolen cars. When Frank was five, his parents were killed in a fire; he was raised by his cold-hearted uncle. Almost constantly, at the periphery of his memory, Frank flashes on a series of disjointed images involving his uncle and the fire. His journey home becomes a quest to solve the great mystery that lies at the heart of his childhood, the mystery that has prevented him from realizing the potential of his fierce intelligence and has frayed his nerves to the breaking point. With memorable characters and a clever use of the time period, Collins depicts a desperate man stuck in an eternal rerun of the past. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Yes There Is Life After New Jersey
Frank Cassidy is a likeable, well-read lowlife with the most dysfunctional family since Cain and Abel. His marriage is disintegrating, his job is going nowhere, his stepson hates him, and his wife's previous husband, awaiting execution in Georgia, hovers around the family like a malignant phantom. Into this dismal picture comes news that Frank's father (actually stepfather, actually his uncle, Ward), has been killed. Frank has fantasies of going back and claiming his share of the family farm; maybe even unraveling his tortured past, sorting out what really happened when his parents were mysteriously killed in a fire many years before.

Of course there are many complications between low life in New Jersey and new life in the upper peninsula of Michigan. For one, he isn't welcome; for another he has to steal two cars and $4000 to finance the trip. Strangely enough, you continue to like Frank, and you hope things will work out for him. And in strange, unexpected ways, they do.

Along the way he tries to reconstruct his past, hidden behind layers of family secrets, and the destructive probing of an incompetent therapist many years before. And the surprise ending is really out of the ordinary.

Michael Collins is an excellent writer, but the book does have some flaws. The dialogue is sometimes had to believe, too literary for the characters who are speaking it. The portrayal of psychiatric illness and treatment is so far from reality, even for the time portrayed, that it is a little embarrassing to the modern reader. The author should have done a bit more homework in this area.

All in all, though, the book works, it is entertaining, it keeps you involved, and--yes--the characters do find new life. I recommend this book. Louis N. Gruber

chilling and poignant eulogy to our past
There is nothing quite like the disquieting genius of this book, the dream-like skewing of reality and truth, that captures so chillingly, and sometimes disturbingly the free-fall paranoia and despair of its characters, and yet ultimate redemption. Set in the early eigties, but dealing with the mysterious death of the main character's parents in a fire in the early fifties, we are taken on a journey through space and time, first on a road journey from New Jersey to Upper Michigan, then a journey back in time to a sort of 50's esque world of paranoia and secrets. Here we find some strange characters, a murder suspect who has hung himself and exists in a coma at an old Polio and mental institution. It is into this bizarre world of psycho-analysis that the main character must venture to understand a secret 30 years old.
Coupled with this Collins adds another dimension, the main character's wife who was previously divorced and has a husband on death row. His death looms throughout the book. The husband wants to his organs donated for medical purposes, however, his wife suspects, he wants to come after her.
In strange ways Collins brings us face to face with moral and ethical questions. It is often only upon reflection, you see understand what you read which is a weird and discomforting aspect of this book, but works because of the subject matter. I confess to rereading chapters, and in a way that is what the book is about, reruns, about returning again to history, to a story.
Collins has done something few writers are capable of doing, a work where both its content and its style are interwoven in a virtuoso way.
The end will blow you away.

Mysteries wrapped into snow
This book seems to start out on the wrong foot. It is narrated by Frank Cassidy, somebody with only a rudimentary education on the lower rungs of life. You wonder where he gets all that penny-ante philosophy and the flight of lyrics from: "We were all nobodies at our essence". Or "The silver scratches of falling rain". That kind of writing can be irritating.

But, later, we meet up with the characters of the book, such as as the wife Honey and the children Robert Lee and `Ernie, Franks uncle Ward Cassidy, the neighbors Sam and Chester Green, the psychiatrist Dr. Brown, Ward's son Norman and his wife Martha. They all are what you would call "damaged goods". The mystery at the center of the story is: Who killed Frank's parents who dies in the arson of their home. And what goes on with "The Sleeper", who lies in a waking coma at the local hospital. And who killed Ward Cassidy?

The story is told with great skill, lifting the vail of a snowy landscape only a little at a time, keeping you guessing. You get a feeling of floating along with it, never able to penetrate the various mysteries. In that respect, it is a great novel.

The solution to it all comes on the last few pages. It makes convoluted sense, but is far from satisfying. The novel might have more impact if it had been told straight forward, without Frank's ruminations.