'Lost' in the archive

''WE REALIZE the author's ability but think that he should become less fantastic." So wrote Irish author Flann O'Brien's publishers in 1940, rejecting ''The Third Policeman," a brilliant, preposterous mystery set in an unfamiliar part of the world whose features—a vast underground factory called ''eternity," for example—become increasingly bizarre. A similar sentiment was voiced this summer, on innumerable fansites, by devotees of ''Lost," the hit ABC drama about plane crash survivors on an island whose many enigmas—an unseen monster in the woods, for example, and a metal hatch wedged into the turf—weren't explained by last season's final episode.

Worried about snarky comparisons to ''Twin Peaks"—a show whose meta-story became too complex even for diehard fans—the creators of ''Lost" have promised to clear up some of the mysteries. In the season premiere last month, for example, we learned that the island's hatch (shown above) leads to an underground lab. And in a Chicago Tribune interview on Sept. 21, a ''Lost" scriptwriter urged viewers to read a ''really great book" that will be ''prominently featured at a key moment" in 2.3, as the third episode of the second season, airing this Wednesday, is known.

That book? ''The Third Policeman," of course.

The final revelation of ''The Third Policeman" is (spoiler alert!) that the narrator is dead but doesn't realize it. Does this mean all those ''Lost" viewers who've speculated that the supposed survivors were really killed in the crash—making the island some form of limbo or purgatory—were right? The show's creators aren't saying, so I directed my query to Chad Post, ''Lost" addict and associate director of the Normal, Ill.-based Dalkey Archive Press, US publisher of O'Brien's novels.

'''Lost' fansites are abuzz not only about the limbo theory and the underground lab/'eternity' connection," said Post via phone, ''but about the theories of de Selby, a fictional scientist mentioned frequently in 'Policeman', who believed, for example, that a system of mirrors might allow you to look backward into the past." But these are red herrings, Post believes. ''The crucial scene in the book is most likely the one in which one of the policemen shows off 13 identical, nested boxes," he said. ''Maybe there are other islands inside the island—or narratives within narratives. Or maybe the show's creators are poking fun at viewers whose theories are getting far too complicated."

No matter how tenuous the ''Lost"/''Third Policeman" connection turns out to be, Post isn't complaining. In recent weeks, he reported, Dalkey's entire new press run of O'Brien's novel has sold out.

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.