THE BRIEF HISTORY OF THE DEAD

author:
KEVIN BROCKMEIER

Fiction
272 pages
Vintage

There’s a sweet little track on the South Park album Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics called “Dead, Dead, Dead,” which sums up the spirit of the holiday season: “Dead, dead, dead / Someday you’ll be dead / Dead, dead, dead / Someday we’ll all be dead.” And by sweet, I mean depressing as hell, even if it’s absolutely true. Quite a downer, almost a slap in the face, amongst all the other cheery holiday tunes involving musical pooh.

Kevin Brockmeier’s novel The Brief History of the Dead, does much the same thing (although without the pooh). A literal end-of-the-world novel where a pandemic nicknamed “The Blinks” (so called for one of its early symptoms) wipes out huge swathes of the world’s population. Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist employed by Coca-Cola, is unaware of this fact, as she is stranded in Antarctica with two colleagues while on assignment for her company. When their communications system goes down, her associates take off to find help at a nearby research station, but they don’t return, leaving Laura to make the decision to follow them.

Alternating chapters with Laura’s arduous journey across the ice shelf are accounts from the dead themselves, who have appeared in a purgatory shaped like a large city. They wait there, living out a sort of second life (but without the Linden Dollars), until the last remaining person on Earth who remembers them crosses over as well, at which time they move on permanently. As more and more people in the real world die of The Blinks, the city fills up, and then rapidly empties. Those who are left have some kind of connection with Laura Byrd: her parents, her childhood best friend, her former journalism professor (and lover), an evangelical homeless man, a Coca-Cola executive, etc. They all have a story to share, but time is running short for them as well.

For a novel with so many dead people, it’s full of incredible life. Laura’s trek across the ice and her discovery of what has happened to the world demonstrate survival and hope. And the dead who she remembers carry on as if they still lived, eating and drinking and working, even if no heartbeat can be heard in their chests, or breath in their lungs.

At its heart, The Brief History of the Dead is a story of the end of life on Earth, a meditation on death as well as what it means to be alive. You feel for these people, even as you know that they’re doomed. But the novel can also be read as cautionary tale: could this be us someday? If we continue with our exploitative corporate tactics of spreading consumerism at any cost, could it lead to an airborne retaliation that wipes out life on the planet?

Dead, dead, dead. Someday we’ll all be dead.

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