Every writer lives with the same terrible knowledge: that we’d better get these stories out while we can, because death is coming. Looking back on the heritage of other spooky writers who lived in poverty and precarity, I myself am always concerned that there isn’t time enough left to write and publish all the things I hope to. Cast your eyes upon the tombs of the greats and see that they probably had less time than they thought they would. Poe died at 40. Dickinson at 55. Fitzgerald at 44. Drama queen Lord Byron quite possibly takes the funeral cake at 36.
Is it any wonder, then, that some authors engage the conceit of telling a story in the voice of a dead protagonist? Tip your ear and hear the chorus of the dead. (Some spoilers follow, but none of these works are new.)
Ambrose Bierce in 1890 managed the literary feat of “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Told in a chronological jumble, it’s a dreamlike story of a man who escapes execution and experiences the meaning of life through the narrow keyhole cast by the near-death experience. Or so it seems, anyhow. This inventive story swings between the universal human experience of wanting to live, and the almost incomprehensible human experience of not knowing what it means to live until life is almost gone. Filmmaker Robert Enrico adapted this tale in 1962 into a short film with almost no dialogue, which was later turned into an episode of the seminal Twilight Zone television series. Both the story and the adaptation are mortal time well spent.
In what became one of the biggest books of the early 2000s, Alice Sebold had the unusual idea to start with the prototypical raped and murdered sacrifice teenage girl after the action had taken place. In 2002’s The Lovely Bones, narrator Susie Salmon is already dead by the time she tells the reader (frankly, graphically, you have been warned) about the acts of violence that ended her life. Although the novel doesn’t skip the terrible moments, the majority of it is about coming to terms with the end of life, and the struggle being mostly the problem of those left behind. Pete Jackson adapted the book into film in 2009, carrying with it the elegiac mood of a young girl’s mourning for her own truncated existence in firm and confident hands.
The phrase “I am Providence” is famously emblazoned on the tombstone of horror author and noted racist H.P. Lovecraft. It is from that epitaph that Nick Mamatas takes the title of his 2016 novel I Am Providence, the story of a murder and subsequent investigation at a Lovecraft convention. This whodunnit-style sendup of convention culture is wry and fascinating, told in alternating chapters of close third person and first person from Panos Panossian, murdered writer and central corpse to the narrative. Mamatas is the kind of author who can’t just give us a body on a slab; instead we hear Panossian’s fleeting thoughts about the murder and the community in general, as well as his reaction to the physical decomposition of his specific body parts: skin, brains, liquefying organs, as the breakdown begins. Be warned: the book is a little bit of a roman à clef, if you read a lot of modern horror.
There are a handful of famous examples of this trope that you might be thinking of right now (The Book Thief, Thirteen Reasons Why, Our Town) that I haven’t included on this list. That’s because they are not good.
What’s good is Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders’ 2017 retelling of the death of one of Abraham Lincoln’s children and the president’s very public struggle to grieve. Bardo is told in a cacophony of voices, all of them denizens of the D.C. cemetery where Willie Lincoln, dead at 11 years old, is laid to rest. Saunders’ genius is not that he entertains the fame and legend of a short-lived president or the mourning customs of 19th century America, but that he dwells in the voices and indignations and misapprehensions of the dead. Whether these folks are recently or centuries in their graves, each of them still struggles with what they assumed would happen, or with the petty gossip of the little neighborhood of tombs, or with all that they left behind. As gorgeous as it is unconventional, this novel is more familiar with the society of the dead than any other like it. Despite a famous family at its heart, this is a novel of the people, by the people, and for the people.
The final speaking dead person on this list must be Maali Almeida, hero of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida. Published in 2022 by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka after a Covid-related delay (pesky mass death!), it tells a romantic and heartbreaking story about personal tragedy and how it relates to a national tragedy. The deceased Maali, from the beginning of the book, has seven days (“moons”) to maintain his connection to the world of the living, and accomplish one last task after being murdered and dismembered as anonymously as any other dead person that has ever died. This last task keeps him tethered to the people he loved most and to his nation, of which he has exculpatory evidence that he knows will be important to his people’s history. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, Seven Moons is a work of satire, wit, beauty, and tragedy in equal measure.
Every author knows there’s no way to cheat death. We’re all surrounded by supplements and yoga mats and plans to drink less and the hope that we’ll outlive our last good idea. But many of us can’t help but write a story that makes it seem as though maybe we have found one.
