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The cover of “Crumbtown” by Joe Connelly, author of "Bringing Out the Dead.” &#

Crumbtown is populated by ex-cops who now play cops on television, half-twins who have the same father and birthday but different mothers and a former child TV star who’s now coke-addled and method acting. The cast of characters isn’t exactly your run-of-the-mill next-door neighbors, yet there’s still a sense of strange familiarity as you read them. In Crumbtown, fate demands coincidence being the rule, not the exception. Crumbtown is a place of moral ambiguity, blurred by the frenetic pace at which life happens.

“Crumbtown” is the mythical title place of author of “Bringing out the Dead” Joe Connelly’s second novel. “Bringing out the Dead” was a fictionalized telling of Connelly’s time as a paramedic, which legendary filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Paul Schraeder made into a film starring Nicolas Cage. The experience of being on the set was a perspective breaker for Connelly.

“‘Who am I here?’ I wondered. ‘Frank (the main character), or am I me, or Nic Cage?’” Connelly said.

In “Crumbtown,” everybody’s life is being turned into a TV show. The result is a book that follows the crumbs of society, such as Don Reedy, an imprisoned bank robber who’s released to be a consultant on a TV show being made about his life of crime, which catalyzes the events of the rest of the story.

“Crumbtown” runs on speed. There are car chases with backward driving, and there are records played at a speed too fast. Connelly wrote the book attempting to keep up with the pace of TV shows and movie sets. He tried to write it combining nursery style prose with sitcom-style, hammy one-liners. He intentionally set out to break from the idea that the novel has to be slow and doesn’t push the same limits television does.

“I just wanted to write something fast and fun, but after you’re done with it, it makes you think for a couple days,” Connelly said.

“I’m not trying to say we’re all lost because of television,” he added.

Connelly is not concerned with traditional conceptions of the writer. He prefers his job as part of the ski patrol in a small town because, hey, you get to ski.

“Being a writer’s not so great, sitting in front of a laptop for five hours and telling everyone to be quiet,” Connelly said. “It’s obnoxious.”

For his next work, Connelly is beginning to consider, coincidentally, writing a story about small-town volunteers. It’ll be a change from the malleable identity crises constantly occurring in “Crumbtown.”

“The ultimate truth of what I’m writing is that it is the blur between the literal and fantasy,” Connelly said. “They’re getting used to rationalizing.”