‘Afterlives’ traces what happens after we die

Wondering about the afterlife and what comes after death is pretty natural. Do angels greet us? Maybe there’s a warm and loving welcome from a longgone family pooch? Or does a vast swath of nothingness await in the hereafter?

Thomas Pierce’s touching, thoughtprovoking debut novel The Afterlives (Riverhead, 366 pp., ★★★☆) delves into the familiar desire to figure all that out, centering on a guy who died. Part love story and part speculative sci-fi, it’s a meandering, albeit meaningful, look at marriage, technology and ghosts — those of the otherworldly type but also specters of our past that influence our present.

After a cardiac arrest — what his doctor deems a “misfire” — 33-year-old loan officer Jim Byrd is able to monitor the device keeping his heart in tip-top shape via an app on his phone. What nags him, though, is that in the few minutes he was technically dead, there were no shining lights or heavenly hosts.

Seeking out an afterlife becomes an obsession for Jim: He hears voices at the haunted stairs of a Tex-Mex joint in his North Carolina hometown — which has become a haven for the elderly — and finds a physicist who studies the possibility of communicating with the dead, all fueling his desperate need to find the answer to “What’s next?” At the same time, he discovers a grounding force in Annie, the childhood sweetheart he reconnects with who lost her husband in a tragic accident.

Loss weighs heavily on most of Pierce’s characters, even bit players who weave in and out of Jim’s life. Interspersed is a love triangle from the past involving two brothers and a girl that acts as a tragic echo of the main plot: For most of The Afterlives, it’s a tangential time line that’s puzzling in its connection to everything else, though by the end it becomes a satisfying addition to the overall tapestry.

That’s true of many of Pierce’s story threads, from the mysterious dog mentioned on the first page to a fittingly named contraption called the Reunion Machine.

Fans of The Leftovers, A Ghost Story and others of their metaphysical ilk will find loads of heady stuff in The Afterlives that’ll put them in good spirits. A new-age church where holograms give sermons, characters fretting about the fragility of existence and decisions that need to be made regarding The Great Beyond are introduced as food for thought — like a pack of ethereally tinged Slim Jims, they can be tough to chew on but end up tasty when you sit back and savor them.

Author Thomas Pierce