Review: The Brief History of the Dead

I recently fin­ished read­ing The Brief His­tory of the Dead by Kevin Brock­meier.

The book’s premise is inter­est­ing: After death, every­one goes to “the City”, a sort of wait­ing room between earth-life and what­ever comes after death. The catch: Once every­one that remem­bers you dies, you leave the City and go to… I don’t know. The author didn’t think far enough ahead to say what hap­pens after you leave the City. You just vanish.

In the book, every­one in the world dies but a sin­gle per­son. This means that the only peo­ple left in the City are those that this last indi­vid­ual remem­bers (thou­sands of people).

So was it a good book? Eh. The author fre­quently started down a path that would lead to a good story about dif­fer­ent indi­vid­u­als in the City, but always stopped short of actu­ally get­ting any­where inter­est­ing. Which was frus­trat­ing. To top it off, the author’s con­clu­sion to the book was extremely weak and left me think­ing: “That’s it? It’s over?”.

Over­all, it was a good book except for the end­ing. Like I said, I wish the author would have picked a sto­ry­line he liked and stuck with it, instead of start­ing and pre­ma­turely stop­ping half a dozen other sto­ry­lines through­out the course of the book. I would have pre­ferred a more con­clu­sive end­ing instead of the copout end­ing he chose.