Afterlife has myriad possibilities
In his bestselling 2006 novel, The Brief History of the Dead, Kevin Brockmeier depicts the afterlife as a city where the departed go about their business much the same as they did on Earth.
They drive cars, read newspapers, eat in restaurants, exercise and sleep. They dream about their futures and pore over their pasts. They even ponder an after-afterlife, as most of them pass on again after about 70 years.
It's a sad vision, but not a hopeless one, as Brockmeier sees more wonder than despair in the mystery of existence.
The Ghost Variations, Brockmeier's new and much grimmer book, imagines not one afterlife but a hundred of them. Few, if any, resemble paradise. Hell is hell, of course, but even heaven doesn't seem all that appealing in this collection of stories.
The souls of humans, horses, trees and even mosquitoes don't always stay gone. Some of them return to haunt our world because they have no choice. Others because they can.
Death comes without warning. Lives end after bodies tumble from cliffs, get conked by tree branches, disappear under landslides and suffer electrocution. One man dies of a heart attack while being attacked by an alligator. In the hands of Stephen King or Karen Russell, such horrific ends might yield nasty, morbid thrills. But Brockmeier isn't out to raise goose bumps, though easily spooked readers will shiver.
Among the more disturbing ideas Brockmeier presents is that the dead receive few answers. Most only find themselves with more questions. In Minnows, a spirit awakens to “a fate for which his imagination had simply not prepared him.” He is the ghost of a person who has yet to be born and after whose death he will become a ghost again. He is troubled by the why of it all.
Brockmeier's book has at least the appearance of fun. The first page of every story is topped by a cute, cartoonish illustration. Light sneaks in through the cracks. In the story, A Lifetime of Touch, a sculptor dies while working on his masterpiece but nonetheless begins “la-de-daing through the afterworld.”
Readers may wish they could do the same during parts of this book. It would require a supernatural effort to fill a 100-story collection with nothing but winners, and Brockmeier is, after all, only human. He has more than one dud.
The real ectoplasm holding this book together, though, is existential dread. Even a medium would have difficulty reading more than a few of these stories in one sitting. In Elephants, a pachydermologist in Africa experiments on a herd of wild elephants by playing them recordings of their own vocalizations.
When his stereo broadcasts the call of the herd's late matriarch, the animals respond with a joy that turns to sorrow after they realize the mother elephant is nowhere to be found. Their debilitating grief, along with the researcher's shame, hovers over everything that follows.