...when the Afterlife experiences its own apocalypse

October 17, 2021 9:32 AM

Short Storyfllter: The Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier "...Occasionally, one of the dead, someone who had just completed the crossing, would mistake the city for Heaven. It was a misunderstanding that never persisted for long. What kind of Heaven had the blasting sound of garbage trucks in the morning, and chewing gum on the pavement, and the smell of fish rotting by the river? What kind of Hell, for that matter, had bakeries and dogwood trees and perfect blue days that made the hairs on the back of your neck rise on end? No, the city was not Heaven, and it was not Hell, and it certainly was not the world. It stood to reason, then, that it had to be something else. More and more people came to adopt the theory that it was an extension of life itself—a sort of outer room—and that they would remain there only so long as they endured in living memory. When the last person who had actually known them died, they would pass over into whatever came next."

This story became the first chapter of the book by the same name. Kevin Brockmeier is a fantasy and children's author; and three-time winner of the O.Henry short story awards.

posted by storybored (17 comments total)

Anyone who enjoys this should likely seek out David Eagleman’s book of short stories Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives. Forty tiny stories (the longest is maybe ten pages), each one depicting a different afterlife, from the one where God is a bacterium and the faithful are microbes (we are just the nutritional substrate) to the one where we are immediately questioned by smaller, duller being as to, “What is answer?” (we are the supercomputers they built to find the meaning of life).
posted by ricochet biscuit at 10:13 AM on October 17, 2021 [5 favorites]

This was a fantastic read, and oddly prescient in places, given it dates back to 2003. Gonna have to avail myself of the book that followed.

Thanks so much for sharing this here.
posted by armeowda at 11:20 AM on October 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

I really liked reading this & I usually can't read anything.
posted by bleep at 11:56 AM on October 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Life_(film) from Japan for a different reason to pause on the way.
posted by wmo at 12:08 PM on October 17, 2021 [4 favorites]

The book is lovely, too.
posted by Eddie Mars at 12:45 PM on October 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

@wmo — hands down one of my favorite movies.
posted by Silvery Fish at 12:47 PM on October 17, 2021

I deeply love this book! One of those ones I find myself thinking about at least monthly, and often daily since COVID.
posted by skookumsaurus rex at 1:06 PM on October 17, 2021

I love Kevin Brockmeier so much. He was one of a small number of authors whose work fell into the strange intersection of mine and my mother's literary tastes, and it was so wonderful to connect with her talking about his stories.
posted by augustimagination at 2:48 PM on October 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

Nice. I was just reading "The Great Divorce" by Lewis. If his endless city of the dead isn't an inspiration for this one, then some Platonic ideal is for both. Definitely buying the book now.
posted by TreeRooster at 3:21 PM on October 17, 2021

Also coming in to recommend the complete novel, which was quite moving.
posted by thomas j wise at 3:24 PM on October 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

See also Will Self's How the Dead Live, from 2000.
posted by what does it eat, light? at 3:51 PM on October 17, 2021 [2 favorites]

Thanks for reminding me about Kevin Brockmeier and things to reread from the shelf. I enjoyed the novel that this turned into, and the earlier story collections - the Truth about Celia and Things that Fall from the Sky.
posted by janell at 6:57 PM on October 17, 2021

Aardvark Cheesedog--

But Farmer and Brockmeier have very different aims? And the stories themselves--and their premises--are quite different?

And even stories that share a central idea can be executed in different ways? For example, just because the Descent of Inanna and the myth of Orpheus and the Odyssey and the Aeneid and the Inferno and the Descent of Alette all center around a descent to the underworld doesn't mean that they all have to adopt the same approach to the idea?

And, re: "where does the stuff come from?"--I don't really see how Farmer's grails are notably better than stuff just showing up?
posted by what does it eat, light? at 11:11 AM on October 18, 2021 [3 favorites]

TFA is a good example why genre enthusiasts grit their teeth when a lit-fic writer decides to swoop in and show people how it's done.

Look some people like detailed world-building set on a framework of rules, stretched across hundreds of pages and other people like to just watch some ideas dance about in a 20 minute read...I'm not sure that the latter is someone trying to, like, "show up" the former. There's not exclusive access rights to the theme of an afterlife.

But aside from that, why wouldn't the afterlife have capitalism? (Albeit it seems like a kind of play-acting capitalism where people show up to do things but don't seem to actually require capital.) It is the afterLIFE, not a different planet, and we build it (in this telling) from our LIVES, which for many generations now have been rooted in some form of capitalism. We don't know that it always looked like that, just that it looks like that now.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:40 AM on October 18, 2021 [5 favorites]

There's more ways to consume something than just looking for all the holes in it.
posted by bleep at 3:46 PM on October 18, 2021 [2 favorites]

Mod note: A couple deleted. I don't want to remove all the responses, but "how dare a writer write on a universal theme that another writer has also written about" is a weird derail, and we should get back to discussing the story instead of getting all caught up in that odd take. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 11:43 PM on October 18, 2021

Possibly my favorite line is in the roundup of ‘this is how I transitioned’ stories where one person ‘began to snow’.
posted by janell at 2:55 PM on October 19, 2021