After Life (Hardcover)

by Rhian Ellis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
After Life begins with Naomi Ash dragging her boyfriend's dead body down the stairs. Unpleasant, surely, but not, in a culture as numb to violence as ours, especially shocking. The nasty surprise is that we feel every ounce of skinny Peter Morton's weight, that we worry along with Naomi whether the hole she digs to bury him is big enough: "Once when I was a child I tried burying a dead cat in a hole not big enough for it, and I still cannot forget pushing down on it to make it fit, pressing its head with my trowel. Its ears filled horribly with dirt." That last detail is our signal that we have entered a world every bit as visceral as our own, and possibly every bit as mad. Despite the corpse that lies hidden for the first part of the book, After Life is not a whodunit, not even a "whydunit," but some other beast entirely: a tense exploration of the ties between faith, will, and fakery--and between this world and the next.

For Naomi Ash is a medium, and the daughter of a medium, who lives in a town founded and populated entirely by other mediums. From the beginning, she's been privy to all the tricks of her trade. Growing up in New Orleans, she helped her spiritualist mother by faking spirit voices through fans and, in one case, draping herself in a lace tablecloth as the ghost of a dead child. But what begins in fraud, she tells us, has ended "in something at least close to truthfulness":

I, for one, couldn't always disentangle the real from the fraudulent, the truth from its trappings. Sometimes it seemed as if my mother's fakery was just a more interesting and beautiful version of what was real. Sometimes it seemed that the truth needed the lies, as if there wouldn't be any truth without them. At any rate, whatever my mother was doing, it was a rare and powerful thing, perhaps even a form of magic. It enthralled me.

After their move to Train Line, New York, a fairy tale Victorian village run slightly to seed, Naomi and her mother settle into working Psychic Faires and message services. Then Naomi meets Peter Morton, a graduate student on vacation, and falls in love; 10 years later, she's still paying the price.

First-time novelist Ellis produces lovely prose: "A lonely life is a crime without witnesses, it is a movie playing in a locked theater; can you ever really be sure what happens in it? Can you be sure that it happens at all?" At the same time, this author's writing can be willfully unglamorous: her characters have dirty hair and clothes with stains on them, and their world smells like ours, like fried things and wet earth and dirty lake water. In its mix of the mundane and the magical, After Life gets at some fundamental truths about the dead and those they leave behind. You don't have to believe in the spirit world to understand Naomi's final insight as a medium--or to know just how much it hurts: "He would never be completely gone, but he would never, ever be with me." --Greta Kline

From Publishers Weekly
The opening line of Ellis's debut novel, a psychological thriller, engages the reader like tossing a pork chop to a hungry dog: "First, I had to get his body into the boat." The intrigue is anchored and the suspense heightened by recurring themes of mysticism and the supernatural, centered on a complex, finely drawn mother and daughter relationship. Naomi Ash and her mother, Patsy (aka Madame Galina Ash), flee their hometown of New Orleans after Patsy's s?ances cause some trouble with the police. They move to Train Line, N.Y., home to America's largest community of mediums and spiritualists, where Patsy hosts a radio show, The Mother Galina Psychic Hour. Patsy's psychic powers are only partly phony, and both she and Naomi give accurate psychic readings to clients. But while the mother often fakes it, Naomi is honestly searching for her true spiritual gifts, trying to determine whether she really has the power to contact the dead. The story alternates between present and past, revealing how Naomi met and fell in love with a graduate student from Oregon, Peter Morton. Details of his death come to light slowly as, 10 years later, in the present, his bones have been found. A police investigation closes in on Naomi, who has done all the wrong thingsAkeeping Peter's personal effects, for instance. The story ends with a spooky calm rather than a bang, Ellis choosing an evocative, poetic and thoughtful denouement to an action-packed showdown. An excellent storyteller, this new author exhibits a gift for subtlety and suggestive understatement even when dealing with such potentially gaudy themes as clairvoyance, necromancy and murder. 5-city author tour. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult; 1ST edition (July 13, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0670892424
• ISBN-13: 978-0670892426
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,011,853 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Loved This Book!, August 5, 2000

By A Customer

As a long-time avid reader, I have read many books but this is the first time I have felt compelled to comment. Ms. Ellis' book is totally captivating. Her main character, Naomi Ash, is so likeable that even though you know from the beginning "whodunit" you keep hoping that the "why" she did it will still enable her to live happily ever after. But as with real life, there isn't always a happily-ever-after for everyone...not during life; maybe not After Life. Ms. Ellis created a setting so picturesque that it made me want to find "Trainline", NY. Surprisingly, I found she did not draw the town from imagination, but from memory. It exists, still, in 2000 and is as amazing as she describes. The town in the novel and the town in Western NY are both places that once visited will never be forgotten.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A twist to the mystery tale, August 29, 2000

By	A. Maxham "Just trying to help..." - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is about a woman, Naomi Ash, who happened to start life in New Orleans, but her mother, a spiritualist, moves them up to Train Line, NY, a home to a community of spiritualists. And ten years ago, Naomi killed her boyfriend. The day before Labor Day, a construction crew found him.

I ordered this book after I read a review of it in the local paper that included the first line of the book, "First I had to get his body into the boat." I thought, "That's it- I've gotta get this book." I'm not a big mystery reader kinda person, but this was obviously a psychological mystery- Whose body? Why a boat? Did YOU kill him? How'd he die? You slowly learn all the answers to those questions, with the "WHY did he die?" question being answered last. I can't really recall ever reading a book with this approach and it very much intrigued me.

The title "After Life" is really great- Naomi can truly (or maybe truly- she doesn't ever seem to be totally confident) see the spirits of those who have passed on, and even the spirit belonging to the body headed to the boat eventually comes to her. She is dealing with Life After death and not just any death- the death of her boyfriend, a death that we suspect she is responsible for, and she is coping with the responsibility and fear that is associated with the potential of his being discovered (and then, maybe, HER being discovered for his death) and it is a very interesting struggle.

Ellis' ways of describing the world around you is also unique- The mother of the main character Naomi says, "Two people never love each other at the same time. One loves, and the other is in love with being loved. The fun is in guessing which one's you." Or another example- Naomi's first experience with snow, described as follows: "The air smelled different, like water in a tin bucket, and crows flapped in circles over our heads. When I spoke, my voice fell straight out of my mouth, completely swallowed up by snow."

The community of spiritualists is unique, but to me they just seemed like any small town with their own culture and rhythms- only instead of being poultry farmers (like my hometown), they happen to speak to the dead. This is not a criticism- I liked the fact that these people were so real and not romanticized and so matter-of-fact.

The reason for the death at first was (to me) a little disappointing- I thought, "that's IT? " However, the more I think about it, the more I get WHY that's what HAD to happen, and frankly, it just makes Naomi more and more realistic and understandable, and the more of a message there is in the book- again, particularly with regard to the title. You keep seeing how something like that COULD happen.

This is a good book, but it is not a beach book- you will get into it and really think about what you are reading(although I guess you could fly through it, but I think you'd maybe miss the thoughts that it provokes). If you want to read a book to vege out to and be brainless, this ain't it. I definitely recommend this book for it's unique approach to language and to a mystery plot.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best of the summer, July 23, 2000

By	Grant Barber (scituate, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ellis' book transcends categories. Yes it has a setting in world of spiritualism, but it is also set in a villiage of spiritualists with their communal institutions (odd to compare Shaker villiage w/spiritualism, but that's the closest I can get). It has "psychological" elements, but the scope looks at what it means to be human from a unique perspective, one that I've not encountered in any other book. Control of language, tone, voice is wonderful. This is fresh, intriguing, effective, my candidate for the best read of the summer regardless of genre.