The Afterlife in Fiction

 

I made this list with my short reviews a few years ago. Happy to hear more recommendations. 

YA Fiction

The Brothers Lionheart by beloved Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, creator of  Pippi Longstocking. An unflinching look at death and the afterlife in which two young boys must take part in a war in a very unpeaceable kingdom on the Other Side before the way to a happier land of light is opened. There is a Swedish film version.

The Lovely Bones by Anne Sebold is the moving story of a teenage girl who watches her family trying to cope with her death after she has been raped and murdered. There is a good film version.

The Afterlife by Gary Soto describes a teen boy’s life and love as a ghost after he is murdered in a rest room while prepping for a date. We don’t get beyond the lower astral, but it’s worth reflecting on the scene where the protagonist and his new girlfriend literally give up the ghost.

Elsewhere by Gabrielle Zevin presents an afterlife that is much like the regular world except that everyone ages backward until they are born into another life.

The Amber Spyglass by Philip Pullman contains an extraordinary sequence where Lyra and her companions travel to a world of the dead because of a promise she made to a dead friend in a dream. The conditions for their entry and the deal they make with fierce guardians of this death realm make fascinating reading.

 

Adult Fiction

The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You by Dorothy Bryant, while not explicitly about death or dreaming, opens our minds to the possibility of living and learning in a realm beyond the physical body and being reborn to this life carrying soul gifts from that realm.

The Oversoul Seven Trilogy by Jane Roberts takes us with verve and deep insight into the interplay between personalities living in different times who are members of a multidimensional soul family and whose dramas – from the perspective of a guide on a higher level – are all being played out simultaneously, in a spacious Now

All Hallows Eve by Charles Williams is a supernatural thriller by a member of the Inklings (along with Tolkien and C.S. Lewis) that contains an indelible description of a dead person waking up to the fact that they are now in an astral, rather than physical, body.

What Dreams May Come by Richard Matheson is well worth reading for its detailed accounts of transitions in the afterlife, the central role of imagination in shaping the realities the deceased inhabit, and the brave and ultimately successful attempt of the protagonist to rescue his wife from the mind-generated hell of a suicide. It was turned into a popular film starring Robin Williams.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. A young woman whose body is near extinction after an overdose is allowed to experience some of the parallel lives she is living in worlds where she made different choices, and determine whether she can make a firm commitment to any of them.

Drawing "Swan on a Black Sea" (c) Robert Moss. Ink and watercolor

 

 

Have a Close Encounter with Death, Wake Up in a Different Life

 

I reread Philip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.  It's an engaging sci fantasy yarn about a future American police state. The protagonist, TV celebrity and alpha “Six”, Jason Taverner, is hurled out of his privileged life by a familiar plot ruse that works: he has a close brush with death and finds himself in a different reality.

 The device is used beautifully in The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and in the BBC Wales series Life on Mars. In Kin, the protagonist wakes up in another world where he regains his humanity and sense of life’s purpose before being sent back to the reality he came from, where he has bills to pay. 

In Life on Mars, a cop is thrown back to 1973 while his body lies in a coma after a near-fatal accident. He has an identity here, close to the one he has in the present. He is again a police inspector, with transfer papers that say he was reassigned from “Hyde”. In 1973 he was (and is) four years old, and catches a glimpse of his child self. He gets engaged in cleaning up a corrupt police department and introducing methods for collecting and handling evidence that no one has heard about. From time to time – through a voice on TV or a phone call no one else can hear - he learns about his situation in the present. Will he die in 1973 as well as the present if they turn off the respirator?

 In Flow My Tears the close call is delivered by an otherwise unexplained monster from a B horror, a “cluster sponge” with fifty feeding tubes flung at him by a psychotic girlfriend. He kills the thing with whisky, but some of the feeding tubes stay in. When he comes round, he’s not in hospital but in a cheap hotel in a bad part of L.A., minus all the I.D. that makes life possible in this reality. The people he knows – agent, lawyer, official mistress – are all in this reality but they don’t know him and when he manages to check, there is no record of his birth.

The scifi elements are charmingly creaky, like old space cowboy flicks without special effects. No cell phones or internet here. When Taverner wants to phone, he drops gold dollar coins in a public phone booth. (Where do you find public phone booths these days?)

Have a close brush with death and come back to a different world. For some of us, it's not fiction. I was pronounced clinically dead under a surgeon's scalpel during an emergency appendectomy in a Melbourne hospital when I was nine years old. In the minutes I showed no vital signs, I seemed to live a whole lifetime in another world. When I came back, my "prime ' reality seemed very strange. I wrote that story in The Boy Who Died and Came Back. Philip K. Dick was no stranger to such things.