Author: Kevin Brockmeier
Pages: 272
Year Published: 2007
If you were to die, who would remember you? Your spouse? Your children? Co-workers? Maybe even your parents?
That’s the premise behind this “urban fantasy” by Kevin Brockmeier. Brockmeier creates a world - The City - in which the newly dead remain while there is someone still left on Earth to remember them. Here they live their lives, much as they did before, until the last person on Earth who remembers them dies. Then they pass on somewhere else.
The second storyline, told in parallel, concerns a young woman, Laura Byrd, who sets out on a quest to seek help in the Antarctic when the radio at her station becomes disabled and, after weeks of silence, no help continues to arrive. As travels across the bleak landscape, she finds plenty of opportunity to remember pieces of her life and the people who she knew.
It’s a gentle book. Action junkies should look elsewhere. It’s also a novel of ideas, so if you’re looking for a strong plot, then this isn’t your book either. However, Brockmeier’s musings on memory, love and loss surreptitiously reach inside you and poke around. At least one of the tales contained within will resonate with your own experiences.
A nice change of pace from the “typical” fantasy, The Brief History of the Dead is a short read, but certainly worth the time invested. If I had one complaint, it would be that the book was too short, but then again, that might just be because I wanted to stay in Brockmeier’s creation a bit longer.
Other participants in the “52 in 52″ meme who reviewed books recently include:
- Jeremy reviews Frank Miller’s Elektra Assassin.
- Jamie reviews Soon, I Will Be invincible by Austin Grossman.
- Heliologue reviews Douglas Adams’ So Long and Thanks For All the Fish.
-K
