Customer Reviews

Living with the Dead

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The cover art is fantastic and I wish the author all the success, but I just didn't like the book. Explaining my reasons as brief as possible goes like this, «the book went nowhere». I felt like I got on a bus...drove around and got off where I got on.

This is an intelligent horror story. It tells of a mystical city that lives with the dead. The dead are washed up on the city shores every so often and the responsibility of the locals is to take the dead into their homes. They set the dead up in chairs, beds or whatever and they become part of the city.

Now the cool thing about this book is it's told in four different perspectives, about the same day, a day that the dead washed up, but things were a little different this time. And each retelling of the story, told from a different protagonist, gives more clues about what is happening in this town.

I wouldn't say this was a great story, but it was interesting, intelligent, and had good world building. This was a good story. It also felt like it was a little old school like it might have been written in the early 1900's. Recommended!

The basic idea is fascinating: a fog-wreathed city where black ships come in the night and leave piles of the dead stacked on the docks for the living to tend to. The living take them into their homes and shops, as is their duty as passed down from the unseen (and not entirely sane) government, and because the dead are incorruptible, the town is slowly filling up with the dead. Children stand in the schoolroom because the dead have all the seats; people sleep at their kitchen tables because the dead have their beds; even rooms that are "relatively free of corpses" have a few of the dead propped up around the edges of the room. The traditions that keep the town in this position are ossified, well past Gormenghastian. And under the increasing pressure, the line between the living and the dead... is fraying.

The problem is in how the story is told. The same imagery is used over and over in every story--in the exact same words. Every single story has a series of set pieces, and it's rare for one of the nearly indistinguishable narrators to have a different perspective on a set piece. By the third story, you're wading through masses of scenes you've already read, couched in phrases you've already seen, looking desperately for something new and fresh. And as each new thing arrives, it's thrown into the mix to be revisited in identical terms by every succeeding narrator. I think the author was trying to make a point about how standardized the townspeople have become, but it was the wrong way to make it.

The ending is also unsatisfying. Without giving away any spoilers--what's happening to the town doesn't contribute to the worldbuilding at all, and as the worldbuilding is the primary attraction of the novella, the ending rings hollow. We don't learn anything about the whys and wherefores of the town. Nor is the central tension between the living and the dead resolved. It's just avoided, and the whole plot vanishes in a burst of metaphysics.

In short, the idea behind Living with the Dead is excellent, but the execution is unsatisfying. I hope Schweitzer revisits the idea in the future and gives us a slightly different take on it.