3.35 avg rating — 17 ratings

"A bizarre fantasy that tries to piece together what happens to a young man after his untimely death places him in dark exile.

When you die before you’re supposed to, sometimes you end up in a strange, in-between place. At least that’s where the unnamed narrator finds himself after a mysterious accident places him in the pathway of a pooch named Parley. Turns out, the Grim Reaper only uses his black cape as a ruse; Parley is actually his true form. And with that knowledge, readers are quickly catapulted into the outlandish, slightly off-kilter explanation of what happens to people in this version of purgatory. They’re not meant to be there, so they’ve got to find a way to pass the time. The book’s main character—though he’s never truly named, he earns the nickname Wit because of his sense of humor—is understandably puzzled by his predicament and filled with a strong desire to go home. In his often disturbing yet oddly endearing novel, Miller creates a kind of “Jabberwocky”-style story in which fans of strange, Seuss-ian characters—“[the angel-cat], Pillow, is the goddess of Lost Sleep. Don’t let her yawn on you or you’ll be snoring for a hundred years; or until a passing virgin kisses you”—will feel right at home. Readers never get terribly comfortable with the characters Wit meets, and they’re probably not supposed to; this is the afterlife, after all. Yet the story is so whimsically told that the Through the Looking Glass frivolity starts to make a strange sort of sense."