Chantel's Reviews > The Afterlives

** spoiler alert ** It is important to note that most of the themes explored in this book deal with sensitive subject matters. My review, therefore, touches on these topics as well. Many people might find the book's subject matters & those detailed in my review overwhelming. I suggest you steer clear of both if this is the case. Please note that from this point forward I will be writing about matters that contain reflections on the death of a loved one, the death of an animal, grief, & others.

There is a line that is crossed when our time is up. Some may view this as the clock’s final round or the sound of a terminal click, the end. However, you view this, & perhaps you may reflect on the finalization of your life through a religious lens, one does not return to the flesh. Yet, throughout history, the belief in the paranormal has both been shunned & sought out. Famous, classically delicious literature such as Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Grey” (1890); Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” (1847); & Peter Straub’s “Ghost Story” (1979) have highlighted the ghoulishly devious nature of life after death.

Whatever views a reader holds towards these stories & the many others that colour the shelves, the subject matter remains one that seeps into the consciousness of each of us. Perhaps, the reader in question wishes to believe that death brings a great nothingness or, that a bright & shining God will greet them. In other cases, the death of the body leads to a road down which the soul will travel to meet its new life. The possibilities seem endless & yet with all the pondering & philosophizing, humanity has yet to arrive at a set conclusion.

I will not fault us for the inconclusive result of our efforts. There have certainly been reasons to believe that the essence of our person—our spirit, if you are so inclined—returns, or never left the earth. In other cases, the absence of proof elongated the years shadowed by love, such as in the case of Bess, Harry Houdini’s widow.

The reader will find that the ever-present paranormal aspects of life are both gargantuan & utterly inconceivable to the human eye. It may stand to reason that certain experiences leave us closer to the other realms of reality or, the conclusion of a life we are currently leading. In the case of this story, the main character’s experience with the afterlife comes at a price, one that has left him feeling hollowed out & abandoned by the glimmer of hope he held that something, or someone, was waiting for him in the darkness of the end.

Jim dies, medically speaking, with enough time for him to take in the void that is death. The story begins with his reflection on this event & leads the reader down a series of investigative conversations, intertwined with the gory nature of magic & mysticism, ever present in the world & fiction today. Readers will be asked to forgive the salient nature of this story. Jim’s experience with death comes to him in the middle of the day. The reader will also find that it is in the sun that all life ceases to shine. Who then is left to fill the world with humanity?

This book follows Jim as he becomes aware of a paranormal occurrence that haunts a local building. The establishment was used as a restaurant when first welcomed on the scene but had been someone’s home before. Jim seeks to answer whether a person or a place can hold the remnants of life & whether the wormhole of existence can be sustained throughout the ages of a series of lives.

The haunted space is explained as being something of a tear in the zone. The author explains that each space is like an ozone layer around those living inside it. The tear has allowed Jim to wander through the plane of existence & in so doing, to present himself as he is to those who are no longer alive with him. Throughout the story, Jim sees ghosts, & hears them wander the stairs & then he becomes the spiritual essence of his person & wanders the gallantly set path before him, finding his way back to his father. All the while, Jim’s heart is kept beating by a machine.

There are many ways in which a reader might interpret this book. On the one hand, perhaps Jim is a person who has gone mad under the thumb of a life that will be taken from him at any second. His heart failure struck a nerve, so to speak, & Jim never truly emotionally recovered from the experience. I cannot fault him for this. I can only imagine what it must have been like for him to wander the casual laneways of life, unsuspecting that in the next second one of his primary organs would fail him.

Meandering in the background of philosophizing queries is the loss of a person, the demise of consistency, & the permeating truth that nothing lasts forever. The nature of this loss is used as a reinforcement to the main premise—that something lost can be regained—while also supporting the reality that we have met time & again—that the curtain never opens to declare mortal man eternal.

In each scene, the author incorporates the back-and-forth nature of loss. Whereas Jim had once lost touch with Annie, she returns as though by magic at a random but ideal moment. In time, he might feel that what the eye can see may limit his gauge of the track, in its entirety.

Different ideologies are incorporated within these narratives & staunch followers of religious schools of thought will recognize the casual mentions of their pillars. This increased my enjoyment of the story. I wondered where the author might lead the reader next. Which school of thought; which bound text named the word of God, would be woven into the desire to rationalize, secure & compound the inexplicable nature of the final vanishing act?

While these questions perused my mind, I like George Washington, cannot tell a lie, nor do I wish to; this story was incredibly corny & the stylistic approach that the author took was cheesier than raclette.

The characters in this book are reminiscent of tenderly formatted parts, stitched together to make a point. I was not invested in their story on an individual level. Neither characters nor scenes felt intricate. While reading I was reminded that this was a book of make-believe. This is not necessarily bad however, it was not an immersive undertaking; I read knowing something would be revealed & my enjoyment of the process was not so much the point as was the revelation of the information.

To be clear, I could have chosen to abandon the book when Jim rambled on about his heart being powered by a machine or when the machine’s database was hacked, repeatedly. These occurrences laboured my reading in so far as they continuously asked the reader to make links between what was being told & what might have been happening in real life.

Will a reader puzzle the nature of Jim’s concerns that his heart will implode due to the malevolent nature of neutral numbers; one day his fraction will flip & he will find himself the victim of a mathematician’s conniving breach of the system that keeps him alive? Can a person feel empathy for a family of ghosts?

None of these statements are meant to denote anything particularly negative. A reader unlike myself will revel in the indifferent nature of the narratives. A part of me certainly did not particularly care that none of the ghosts were given to the reader with their backgrounds strapped to their backs. On the other hand, I wanted the author to be fastidious; I longed for the story to take itself seriously, to tell the reader that a ghost was depressed & his ambitions resulted in anger & a dead family. Rather than be met with the cruelty of clearly written words, I stumbled over cobblestones that were neither old nor meaningful to the landscape.

This leaves me wondering how the stories are meant to be interpreted. Certainly, one will see the interwoven reality behind the layer that shields each life from another. However, how does one recognize the repeated nature of their experiences in this cycle of existence if not through self-awareness? Can one assume that each individual is self-aware? Does each person repeat a life cycle endlessly? Does this mean that no person is free?

I find myself wanting more from this story & yet when asked, I would happily state that I enjoyed it, very much in fact. Not all stories require a sturdy pen. It can be enough for there to be ink & an eye to decipher shapes, therefore making clear the tar on bark.

The author wanted to wonder & he allowed himself to do so with characters who did not hold the depth of a regular person. I say this while recognizing that we are not all magic pools containing ecosystems; some people are rain puddles, & others, are drops of water on a flower petal. Perhaps I am wrong to harbour a rather minuscule annoyance that this story did not give me what I wanted for, in reality, nothing is for everyone.

If a reader has the patience to listen to concerns & grief, guilt & sadness, they too will find this story to be a marvel of tenderness, simplistically listed alongside roving machinery & quirky personalities. Ultimately, not every story needs to be written in the style of Sartre or Aristotle. Books are meant to reflect the writer whose mind wandered past the walls of their home, the fields of their dreams, & into the palette of a famished reader who longs for the creaking wood in their walls to mean more than what has been concluded by the exterminator.