The Afterlives

October 9, 2017
Pierce’s first novel (after the story collection The Hall of Small Mammals) is a free-spirited lark that questions how people live with the presence of death. After suffering cardiac arrest and a five-minute clinical death, 33-year-old commercial loan officer Jim Byrd is outfitted with an experimental defibrillator called a HeartNet. Soon after, Jim begins to notice strange things in the world around him: holograms of dead celebrities like Prince and Robin Williams begin to walk the earth, a strange Christian sect called the Church of Search comes to town, and Jim becomes obsessed with a staircase that may be a portal to the afterlife, through which a voice enigmatically chants, “The dog is on fire.” His companion in these investigations is a young widow named Annie Creel, and, after the two impulsively marry, they find questions of life and death intruding on love. More subplots accrue, including the league of unscrupulous elders known as the White Hairs, the legacy of a blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter, and rumors of a hacker targeting the HeartNet technology. Pierce’s breezy style only partially saves the overlong novel from a lack of urgency affecting almost all of its numerous story lines. When it gels, the novel manages a rare and significant clarity about the effects of death on the living (particularly couples, aware that all romance is ultimately temporary), but otherwise it seems unsure which story it wants to tell. Agent: Jin Auh, Wylie Agency.

November 1, 2017
An author of award-winning short stories (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) considers life, death, and what comes after in his debut novel.Jim Byrd is dead at the age of 33. And then, a few minutes later, he's alive again. This experience has some disturbing repercussions. The first is a surgical implant that reminds his heart to keep beating--which comes with a phone app to let him know every time his heart forgets. The second is that Jim has to go on living with the knowledge that his death wasn't accompanied by a bright light or an angel chorus. With a constant reminder of his own mortality in his pocket and evidence that the great beyond is an eternity of nothingness, Jim goes on a quest for hope and meaning that involves a paranormal investigator, experimental physics, and church services led by holograms. While this novel is set in the not-too-distant future, none of the issues that it addresses are new. Living with the knowledge of death is a universal predicament. Science fiction has been investigating the ways in which new technologies challenge our humanity since Frankenstein, and horror novels from Dracula to Jennifer Egan's The Keep have made use of the eerie qualities of phenomena like long-distance communication. Thomas Edison sincerely believed he could invent a "spirit phone," an idea that gets a 21st-century spin here. What Pierce does with all these tropes is make them boring. One of the experts Jim consults insists that nothing in the universe exists more than 93 percent of the time. This would be a more chilling observation if Jim, himself, was ever fully real. Nothing about him--his job, his friendships, his marriage--seems worthy of sustained attention. The narrative is all just a lot of plodding exposition as Jim fumbles along. He has almost no inner life, which is especially unfortunate since he is not just the protagonist, but also the narrator. There's a second, related tale woven into Jim's story. It is, at some moments, slightly more compelling than the main text, but it mostly just makes a slow novel slower.Timeless questions. Tedious answers.

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November 1, 2017
Small-town commercial-loan officer Jim Byrd's death was brief and something of a disappointment. Jim did not see a light at the end of a tunnel or glimpse the pearly gates. Jim's depressing near-death experience imbues him with a curiosity about the hereafter. When a local restaurateur claims that her establishment has a mysterious presence, Jim researches the property's history and discovers that its early residents died in a fire. Jim soon rekindles a romance with his high-school sweetheart, Annie, whose first husband drowned. Together, Jim and Annie locate the scientist who has built a device that allows one to communicate with the dead. In his first novel, Pierce (Hall of Small Mammals, 2015) deftly and humorously illustrates the myriad ways that technology robs us of our humanity. The concept of hologram grammers walking among us while promoting products is but one clever example. Pierce's measured, straightforward style does not overtly highlight the speculative-fiction elements, adding to their impact. Wildly imaginative and thought-provoking fun for fans of Dave Eggers and Gary Shteyngart.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2017

In his first story collection, Hall of Small Animals, Pierce penned a phenomenological meditation on the ephemeral and recurrent experiences that form the core of human experience. Here, in his debut novel, he reflects on life after death through the prism of quantum physics. A paranormal event on a staircase in town leads Jim Byrd on a journey to uncover the history of the home's residents and the probability of supernatural phenomena. In this quest, he dabbles in New Age religion, falls in love, loses his father, and stumbles upon the ideas of discredited physicist Sally Zinker, who claims to have built a machine that can access the afterlife. Jim, along with his wife, Annie, eventually tracks down both Sally and the mythic Reunion Machine. Not sure who or what to trust, they both must ultimately weigh the possibility of a multiverse against the risk of vanquishing their accumulated experiences and memories in this one. VERDICT Pierce has a gift for probing the limits of the psychic realm to uncover the benevolence that manifests from metaphysical insight. Truly remarkable. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017

A National Book Award 5 Under 35 honoree, Pierce won high praise for his story collection, Hall of Small Mammals ("ridiculously good," New York Times). In this debut novel, Jim Byrd dies briefly at age 30 of a heart attack but remembers no glowing tunnels or beckoning angels after he is revived. He worries that no afterlife awaits him--or any of us. Then a ghost appears, and Jim and wife Annie end up careening through history, faith, and meetings with psychics as they confront love, loss, and what happens next.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2017

In his first story collection, Hall of Small Animals, Pierce penned a phenomenological meditation on the ephemeral and recurrent experiences that form the core of human experience. Here, in his debut novel, he reflects on life after death through the prism of quantum physics. A paranormal event on a staircase in town leads Jim Byrd on a journey to uncover the history of the home's residents and the probability of supernatural phenomena. In this quest, he dabbles in New Age religion, falls in love, loses his father, and stumbles upon the ideas of discredited physicist Sally Zinker, who claims to have built a machine that can access the afterlife. Jim, along with his wife, Annie, eventually tracks down both Sally and the mythic Reunion Machine. Not sure who or what to trust, they both must ultimately weigh the possibility of a multiverse against the risk of vanquishing their accumulated experiences and memories in this one. VERDICT Pierce has a gift for probing the limits of the psychic realm to uncover the benevolence that manifests from metaphysical insight. Truly remarkable. [See Prepub Alert, 7/17/17.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.