Kevin Brockmeier–A Brief History of the Dead
I first came across Brockmeier in the 2005 O’Henry Awards compilation which featured “A Brief History of the Dead,” the story. I was immediately excited: here was an excellent young writer who subtly bends literary fiction through the domains of genre fiction, in the vein of Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon and Kelly Link. Predictably enough, the story is about the afterlife. Perhaps disappointingly for some of the dead, this afterlife is really just like regular old life, but with the twist that one’s afterlifespan is determined by how long one is remembered by the living. This is all good–especially, one suspects, for the extroverted–until something begins happening on earth. The population of the dead city spikes–as huge numbers of people on earth suddenly die–and then plummets–as fewer and fewer people exist on earth to remember the dead. As people die, scraps of evidence indicate that a virus is wiping out the earth’s population, the result being that the dead are eventually to suffer the fate of the living.
This is an excellent story and an intriguing premise. It led me to buy the book by the same name, which came out in 2006, despite my worries that this gimick could drive a story but not a novel. Since the first chapter of the book is basically the story I had read, it wasn’t until chapter two that I discovered that my worries were unfounded. The second chapter finds us in Antarctica, with a scientist/explorer named Laura who appears to be stranded in her camp. It’s a sudden, disorienting break to enter the world of the living again, but Laura’s survival story gathers its own momentum in no time, serving as the backbone for the rest of the book which alternates between the two worlds. In the end, A Brief History has aspects of an adventure thriller with a tinge of metaphysics and existential reflection, all of which combine to make a very compelling package. (When I read a few sections to Lanie, she quickly became hooked, demanding that I read aloud whenever she was around.) There are criticisms that could be made of this book–at times Brockmeier seems to be looking for stories to fill his afterlife, and one gets impatient to return to the plight of our arctic adventurer–but the book works well enough not to dwell on the negative. I’ll be reading a lot more of Mr. Brockmeier, I suspect, and I’ll bet I’m not the only one.