RESURRECTION MEN

Pandering to audiences that relish historical fiction slathered with filth and suffering, Welsh pits an orphaned beggar lad with a shattered leg and some martial-arts training against a pair of genial body snatchers in the employ of a prominent doctor who likes to molest girls and infect kidnapped children with cholera in the name of scientific discovery. The setting is, unsurprisingly, that open running sewer (now) known as Dickensian London, to which young Victor comes inside a coffin he is sharing with a deliquescent occupant. Anything that good being worth repeating, he does the same later on, hiding out after witnessing the clinical dissection of his best friend’s diseased, mutilated corpse. Though against all odds, things are looking up in the end for Victor and the blind beggar with whom he falls in love, Welsh plays this lurid stomach-churner, which he loosely bases on historical events, strictly for shock value, leaving the stage strewn with corpses and gruesome relics. Steer readers with even an ounce of squeamishness (or, for that matter, self respect) to Kathleen Karr’s similarly themed but less graphic Skullduggery (2000). (Historical fiction. YA)