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The Brief History of the Dead

3.65 of 5 stars 3.65 · rating details · 5,977 ratings · 1,176 reviews

From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten. But the City is shrinking, and the residents cl...more

Paperback, 252 pages

Published January 9th 2007 by Vintage (first published January 1st 2005)

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Nov 22, 2012 Eric rated it 2 of 5 stars

I dearly wanted to love this book. The first chapter--establishing a vast city of the recently dead, an afterlife for everyone still remembered by the living--is amazing and beautiful. The second chapter flies off in another direction entirely, and plants us firmly in the ice and snow of antarctica. From there the novel alternates: each odd-numbered chapter explores the city of the dead from a new character's perspective, while the even-numbered chapters follow the adventures of the woman in Ant...more

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Oct 19, 2009 karen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: littry-fiction, table, death-is-not-the-end, dysto-teque, the-end

i always want more. even when i enjoy a book - especially when i enjoy a book... i love the concept of this book, and while its true there are some implausibilities here, and while it gets a little thin in places, it is easy to overlook because it is such a delight to read. yes, a delight.

i am tacking on a little more to this sad and short excuse for a review because i was thinking about this book today, after i finished reading "on the beach". if anyone needs a dissertation topic or just has th...more

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Oct 16, 2007 Saucy Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: cultural-commentary

There are very few authors who write books that haunt me: Neil Gaiman, Kate Chopin. Add to that list Kevin Brockmeier. I didn't think that a book about the end of human civilization would have any affect on me; my ignorance led me into this novel fully unprepared for what I would encounter.

Set in the not-so-distant future, The Brief History of the Dead follows the story of a very big corporate "oops": Coca-Cola unintentionally spreads a virus that kills off the entire human population in a very...more

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Mar 01, 2008 Oceana2602 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: everyone

Shelves: 2007, favourites, english, male-writers

Here's the story how I came by the best book I read in 2007:

So I'm standing at King's Cross station, waiting for a friend of mine to arrive by train. Oh, look, there's a Waterstones! They are having a 3 for the price of 2 sale, and there are two books that I wanted to buy anyway. Now, let's find a third one! This one looks pretty, and it isn't too heavy, gotta fly back tomorrow.
*buys books*

Great, my friend's train is an hour late. Let's read a book. That third one isn't too long.
*reads*
*reads*
*r...more

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Feb 06, 2008 Tim rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I picked up this book after listening to an episode of KCRW's To The Best Of Our Knowledge entitled "Apocalyptic Fiction" (mp3).

I had just finished reading Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," and felt myself compelled to read a bit more "apocalyptic fiction." Unfortunately, the brutal grandeur of "The Road" set the bar too high. It seems unfair to compare the two books, but because I read them in succession I feel I must.

Where "The Road" was almost liberatingly sparse and hopeless, "The Brief History...more

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Sep 01, 2007 Res rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: locus_poll, sff

The one where when people die, they go to live in "the city" until no living person remembers them. Meanwhile, on earth, things are turning out very badly.

I loved the short story that became the first chapter. And there are so many beautifully observed moments that I found the book quite enjoyable while I was reading it. It was only afterwards that doubts began to creep up.

The real-world part of the story has two major implausibilities in it: why the company would consolidate its production into...more

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Aug 01, 2007 liz rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literary

This book had no climax. I mean, I figured out what would probably happen... and then it did. And that was it. It mostly takes place in a city where everyone who's died, but can still be readily remembered by at least one living person, continues to exist. It also follows a three-person research expedition for the Coca Cola company to the Antarctic. A horribly deadly virus escapes into the world population... and whoops, I just gave away the ending.

He could not decide which possibility was the m...more

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Apr 17, 2007 Caleb Liu rated it 3 of 5 stars

The book certainly has an intriguing premise. Brockheimer's idea of the afterlife is a strange metaphysical situation whereby people end up in a large city seemingly doing precisely what they had been doing in their previous lives. If this is purgatory, it certainly is a strange one. This is where the story begins to intertwine with the "real world" which is embodied by the story of a young woman on an Antarctic expedition.

The book was certainly captivating at the beginning, but I began to grow...more

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Jul 17, 2008 Kev rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-sf-fantasy

This book brngs to mind a professor I had in college. He was a New York Jew with a withering wit. It was a graphic design class and he took no prisoners. He'd do a crit this way. One grade for the idea and another for the execution and he'd say thinges like this: "You had a great ideer here, A+ ideer, but LOUSY execution. I gotta give ya a D- for execution, so you getta C+."

Well, in the style of this prof, Kev: "GREAT execution, A+ execution; beautifully written. But I gotta give ya a D- for the...more

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Nov 24, 2012 Chana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, literature-fiction, trippy-fiction, released-through-bookcrossing

I like the idea behind this story; that there are the living, there are the dead who are still remembered by the living, and the dead who have been dead too long to be remembered by anyone living.

The setting of the book is a city of the dead who are remembered by the living. The city is nice, most people are happy and living a life similar, if not better, than they lived in life. People arrive in this city when they die, others disappear as the last of people who remember them pass away themselv...more

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Nov 06, 2008 Ken-ichi rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: escape

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Diverting, but not much more. The book didn't displease me, but it never left the blocks of its central conceit: there's a city you go to when you die, populated by those still remembered by the living. You know that from the dust jacket, and it seems like fruitful territory for some Italo Calvino-esque slices of city life, but Brockmeier keeps his cast relatively small and his narrative surprisingly linear, short, and ultimately unsatisfying. There still seems like opportunity for some straight...more

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Dec 06, 2008 Daniel rated it 5 of 5 stars

One of the few comforts we can draw on when facing up to our own mortality is the fact that we will live on in the memories of those we leave behind. Kevin Brockmeier takes this sentiment and envisions a world in which it is literally true. As such, The Brief History of the Dead makes for a unique take on the idea of life and death, as well as a poignant testimony to the power of memory.

For the dearly departed, there is no heaven or hell in this world of Brockmeier's imagination. Although the c...more One of the few comforts we can draw on when facing up to our own mortality is the fact that we will live on in the memories of those we leave behind. Kevin Brockmeier takes this sentiment and envisions a world in which it is literally true. As such, The Brief History of the Dead makes for a unique take on the idea of life and death, as well as a poignant testimony to the power of memory.

For the dearly departed, there is no heaven or hell in this world of Brockmeier's imagination. Although the crossing can be extremely difficult, each soul finds his/her way to a magnificent City. Apart from the City's mysterious ability to expand in such a way that the newly arrived always have a place to live and work, it proves to be much like Earth. Many of its denizens take up the same kind of life they used to live, performing the same jobs and reuniting with loved ones who have also passed on, while others choose to reinvent themselves. After 60 or 70 years, many of them quietly disappear, but most are too busy living their own lives to really worry about their own distant future. It soon becomes clear, however, that those in the City remain there only as long as they exist in the living memories of individuals on Earth.

The great City undergoes drastic changes when a deadly virus back on Earth begins claiming the lives of a majority of the living world's population. Our only window into this futuristic Earth comes through the eyes of wildlife specialist Laura Byrd, but she could not be more isolated from the infection. Laura is in fact stranded on her own in a hut in deepest Antarctica, having had the rotten luck to be selected as one of three team members sent down there by the publicity-happy Coca-Cola Corporation to explore methods for using pure Antarctic ice in the manufacture of its product (which doesn't sound so crazy once you hear about the environmental problems of this futuristic Earth). Having lost their communications equipment to the elements, Laura's teammates set out for the nearest research station, promising to come back for her. That was over three weeks ago. With the hut's heating coils finally failing, Laura has no choice but to set out on her own. What follows is a visceral and engrossing survival story that would have done Jack London proud. As Laura struggles to survive, the denizens of the City find themselves drastically reduced in number. When they realize they each have a connection to Laura Byrd, it doesn't take a genius to figure out that every other man, woman, and child on Earth is now dead.

The big question is what will happen to the remaining denizens of the City once Laura herself dies. The reader will find this question almost as meaningful as the characters themselves, for Brockmeier makes you a part of their precarious afterlife. Two in particular, a journalism professor who had an affair with a young Laura and one of Laura's childhood friends, are wonderfully evocative characters who serve as the author's primary sounding boards for his speculative ideas of memory vis-à-vis human interaction and its implications for life (and even afterlife) itself.

It's a fascinating novel, but the conclusion may prove a little disappointing to some, for one could say that it ends with a whimper rather than a bang. As a reader, one cannot help but want more than Brockmeier gives us in the end, but I find it hard to criticize a book or its author on those terms. No matter what you think of the conclusion, The Brief History of the Dead is a poignant literary journey offering readers a unique perspective on some of the deepest questions of life and death.(less)

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Apr 18, 2008 Alb rated it 2 of 5 stars

I just finished this book and now I need to go to CuteOverload.com and stare at pictures of puppies before I wander drained of all hope into on-coming traffic. Phew somebody please buy Kevin Brockmeir a balloon bouquet or give him a hug because this guy needs cheering up. I mean don't get me wrong, I like lots of sad, bleak books and I actually think the fatalistic ending was logical and necessary but throw me an interesting charater or a meaningful, complicated relationship every couple of hund...more

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Jan 11, 2008 Jamie rated it 2 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jamie by: Miina

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Few writers have the abilty to write from a gender that is not their own with any real believability and Brockmeier isn't one. It's unfortunate, because the idea for the story was good, dare I say even haunting, but in the end, like Brockmeier's "virus," his inability to make me believe in Laura's character or thought pattern was just as contagious and, ultimately, deadly.
Salon's senior writer seemed to think this book was a manifesto. As I mentioned above, I see the creativity and impressivenes...more Few writers have the abilty to write from a gender that is not their own with any real believability and Brockmeier isn't one. It's unfortunate, because the idea for the story was good, dare I say even haunting, but in the end, like Brockmeier's "virus," his inability to make me believe in Laura's character or thought pattern was just as contagious and, ultimately, deadly.
Salon's senior writer seemed to think this book was a manifesto. As I mentioned above, I see the creativity and impressiveness. However, all-in-all, it pulled A Widow For a Year on me. I use Irving's Widow For a Year (it's better, over-all, I think), because it was a book in which I was throughly engrossed but it didn't change the fact that for some reason Irving had tried to write as a woman an failed.
Widow for a year wasn't ruined by Irving's choice of leading character, but it was hindered. He did such a great job writing her father...shame.
I only wish to express my regret that he choose to make the leading character Laura, rather than say, Hank or Mike. I also wish he had made the cast of "city" character's a little smaller, though I understand, the idea is so novel it would be hard to resist showing more of the city through the lense of multiple characters as a means of casting a bigger picture. As it was, there was a lot of "setting" (ironically, typically a female-writers trait--this was supposed to be "all women could write" with any authority since they never did anything, owned anything or went any where) and almost no chracter development.
Yes, Laura does do a lot of musings--but really. She has sex with her first journalism professor, she knows it's not going anywhere...blah blah blah. And no, I'm not "every" woman and my opinion is, just that, an opinion, but I do know when I read Wally Lamb I am not obsessively distracted by "that's not accurate or believable." I was with Brockmeier, I was with Widow For a Year...heck, I was with the Di Vinci Code (but that was ALL the characters, they were all trite, though I did still brave winter blackness in Brooklyn at five a.m. to sit and shiver to read it. I did like it. There, I said it. I won't lie. I used to eat baking soda when I was little too, I don't know why but admiting it feels the same.)
The City was a cool theory. I like it very much, and many of the asides were good, albiet, word-of-the-day, trite. I liked "red is dead, blue is new" and the notion that people keep doing what they did in life (it gives the idea that at some level we all love what we do a little bit or it at least gives us comfort). But who wouldn't know that Laura's estranged parents would get back together with out the anxieties of the world? And, the aspect for "future" was poorly executed at best--the polar ice caps, for all I know, ARE melting, right? Maybe not as heavily as the story suggests, but certainly not enough for me to know off-hand it's future set. Am i suppose to measure the permafrost or have the committed to memory? Yeah, hearing all large mammals were exstinct kind of tipped me off, but that's pretty subtle to embed that in the last few pages.
I would like to read this novel, done over, with a male protagonist and a selection of Brockmeire's top FIVE favorite "city" characters to focus on. Tell me their stories, tell me their thoughts, perceptions and life. In the word's of Mary Poppins, "well begun is half done," and this novel wasn't well begun--the notion was great, the exicution very poor. I'm often jealous of writers, simply because I have good Ideas, I think, most of us do, and I spend a lot of time writing them in notebooks and never having the abilty to write 275 pages about them in detail. Now I realize perhaps that's not such a bad thing--maybe that's a defense mechanism against medicore writing...or maybe it's laziness. (less)

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Aug 28, 2007 Judith rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: adultfiction

I wanted to give this three and a half stars, but apparently I can't. I really thought this was wonderful--my downrating of it is because I found that some of the Antarctica sequences began to drag a little. But the premise is so fantastic, and the characters of the dead so beautifully realised, that it deserves a high rating.

The premise of the novel--which is set sometime in the forseeable future--is that some kind of plague has struck the Earth, and people are dying by the millions. The dead e...more

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Aug 09, 2007 Robyn rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Great book, with a controversial ending. The author opens with an African folktale about the varying levels of death. As long as someone is alive to remember you, you exist on a plane of neither living nor dead. And so we open into a city of the dead, where the afterlife is unexpectedly a lot like normal life. As the people who knew you die, your spirit fades away.

But in the city of the dead something dreadful begins to happen -- whole communities sweep in and sweep out, as people begin to talk...more

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Jul 16, 2009 Sherrie rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Anyone who loves well thought out fantastical fiction

Shelves: 2006booklist, myfavorites

WOW! One of my favorites of 2006! What a fantastic book! The only way I can do this book justice is to first give you the Editor’s blurb: In a not-so-distant future, a deadly virus kills off every human on Earth, except for Laura Byrd, a wildlife specialist on an expedition to the South Pole. Readers quickly learn that the dead move on to another life in a fantastic city on another plane of existence; there, they live out a second life free from aging and disease until every person who knew them...more

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Sep 10, 2007 Dee rated it 4 of 5 stars

Kevin Brockmeier has two storylines that alternate between the chapters, yet these storylines are closely connected. One is about a world inhabited by those that have died but are remembered by those that are still living. When they are no longer remembered by the living, they disappear. The other storyline is about a woman working for the Coca-Cola company and working in Antarctica. Throughout the rest of the world everyone has died from a fast-spreading virus, which she has not been affected b...more

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Sep 11, 2012 Randy Linville rated it 5 of 5 stars

What a beautiful, unique perspective on the after life! Really caused me think, and imagine. I really love this concept, and having Lost several several close people in the last few years, I come back to to the idea that as long as you are remembered the you are still "alive"

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Jan 20, 2008 Mark rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Mark by: Juli, Amy MT

Shelves: recentlyread

A quirky little novel about limbo (not the dance), about Death (not the guy with the scythe), and about, I suppose, the end of the world (neither a bang nor a whimper). The city of the dead seems just like Pittsburgh, without sports (OK, it can't be Pittsburgh!) or aging. Everyone stays the same age--though apparently not the same condition (no gunshot wounds or signs of disease, etc.)--as when they died, and they remain in the city until the living people they know die, though this is a matter...more

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Aug 25, 2007 Ann M rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction-genre-ish

There should be a particular damp shelf in book hell for science fiction books that start off with an interesting premise and then go absolutely NOWHERE. I mean, nowhere. I'm used to sci fi that starts off well, then is okay in the middle, then fizzles out. This one fizzled right away. I mean, who cares what the city of the still-remembered is like if nothing happens there? Who cares about all the dull crossing stories, and really, WHO CARES about the idiot street preacher as the last human on e...more

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Mar 16, 2009 Kelly rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The Brief History of the Dead had a fantastic premise but ultimately failed to deliver. In this book, there is the earth and the living and there is a city of the recently dead. The dead stay "alive" in this city as long as there are living people on earth who remember them. Once everyone who knows you dies, then you pass on to the final death.

I loved the idea of the city of the living dead and I thought there was some great writing on it. "What kind of heaven had the blasting of garbage trucks...more

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Mar 11, 2009 Megan rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: quirky-fiction

Every once in a while there comes a book that has such a great hook that you can't wait to read it. But often that hook is empty bait, without a satisfying plot to sink your teeth into. When I read the back of the new novel A Brief History of the Dead I was intrigued. What if after you die, you don't immediately go to heaven, but instead you go to the city. The city is where people find themselves after death. It seems like earth, but you never age. You simply stay there for 50 or 60 years, and...more

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Jan 11, 2009 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Jan 02, 2009 Megan rated it 2 of 5 stars

The first chapter of this book was initially published in the New Yorker in spring of 2004, and was quite possibly the best short story I'd read in those pages (The New Yorker and I have somewhat different opinions on short stories, I think). I didn't write down the author's name or the story's title, so a few months later when I started combing my backissues to find the tale again, I was dismayed to discover I'd already trashed that copy.
Fast-forward two years, to the day Brief History of the D...more

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Mar 10, 2013 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Rating: 3.9* of five

The Book Description: From Kevin Brockmeier, one of this generation's most inventive young writers, comes a striking new novel about death, life, and the mysterious place in between. The City is inhabited by those who have departed Earth but are still remembered by the living. They will reside in this afterlife until they are completely forgotten.

But the City is shrinking, and the residents clearing out. Some of the holdouts, like Luka Sims, who produces the City’s only news...more

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Feb 26, 2013 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Those not yet sasha

Recommended to Alan by: Roberta

One of the best ways (I won't say it's the only way) to write really good sf (speculative fiction, that is) is to take a really interesting conjecture and just run with it—to extrapolate the idea logically, even if the original premise defies logic or is unprovable. Kevin Brockmeier's novel The Brief History of the Dead is just such a work, and an excellent example of its kind, though it seems to have flown somewhat under the radar at least from my perspective—it came out in 2006, but I can't re...more One of the best ways (I won't say it's the only way) to write really good sf (speculative fiction, that is) is to take a really interesting conjecture and just run with it—to extrapolate the idea logically, even if the original premise defies logic or is unprovable. Kevin Brockmeier's novel The Brief History of the Dead is just such a work, and an excellent example of its kind, though it seems to have flown somewhat under the radar at least from my perspective—it came out in 2006, but I can't recall having heard about it before from any of my usual sources.

The Brief History of the Dead's interesting idea is simply and clearly stated in its epigraph (which comes from another good book, by the way):

Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are the sasha, the living-dead. They are not wholly dead, for they still live in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, create their likeness in art, and bring them to life in anecdote. When the last person to know an ancestor dies, that ancestor leaves the sasha for the zamani, the dead. As generalized ancestors, the zamani are not forgotten but revered. Many... can be recalled by name. But they are not living-dead. There is a difference.
—James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me

There is a city. It is inhabited by the recently dead, though in many other ways it is like any First World city here on Earth—paved streets with traffic, a suspension bridge crossing a river, sandwich shops and skyscrapers and parks with swing sets. The city is getting more and more crowded, though, and the newcomers are full of talk about a plague which has broken through all national boundaries, all quarantines.

So here's the second big idea in Brockmeier's book: what happens to the sasha when there are likely to be no more living people to remember them?

Kevin Brockmeier's prose is simple and intense, easy to assimilate—somewhere in between Jonathan Carroll's and Connie Willis' in her bleak, powerful book Passage (whose own notions of an afterlife came to mind as I was reading this novel within a single 24-hour span). But Brockmeier still manages to include beauty and frailty, and poetic devices which engage without being excessive... as in this passage about a supernormal stimulus, from later in the book:

Once, though, a behavioral scientist had placed a polished plastic canteen next to the penguins, a fluorescent orange sphere he filled with instant coffee, and they had abandoned their eggs—all of them, all at once—to fight over it. They must have thought it was the most beautiful egg they had ever seen, the scientist speculated in his journal. The egg they realized they had always been waiting for. The egg of the future.
—p.204

I have to agree with my wife, who picked up this book a bit prematurely (it's coming up as one of her colleagues' book group choices in a few months), and couldn't put it down either: The Brief History of the Dead takes its idea and runs with it quite well. It's not every writer who can make plague and death into topics as rewarding as Kevin Brockmeier does. This is a story that made me nod over and over, "yes, yes, that is just how it would be." Not that I believe the premise, but that's not the point. The point is what The Brief History of the Dead does with that premise. And what it does—what Brockmeier does—is simply tell a vivid, evocative story.(less)

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Oct 29, 2012 A.W. Wilson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

If you read my reviews then you'll probably think I just wax lyrical about everything I read. In fact, if I don't enjoy a book I tend to stop reading it and it's not my place to criticise if it happened not to be 'for me'. It's much more fun writing about stuff I've enjoyed anyway, so there!

Guess what? That's right, I loved this book! I normally employ a no-nothing-in-advance technique in which I ensure I've not read any reviews or even read the blurb on the back, because I like everything to be...more

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Sep 01, 2012 Girl in Green rated it 4 of 5 stars

Kevin Brockmeier’s first novel The Truth About Celia (Pantheon 2003) was a story about loss, the dreams and fantasies that are shattered and the new ones that replace them after a child mysteriously disappears. Fantasy became a comforting space to hide in when the reality was too difficult to cope with.

In his second novel The Brief History of the Dead (Pantheon 2006), Arkansas writer Brockmeier once again moves between two worlds, this time his chapters alternate between the world of the living...more

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Jul 09, 2012 ConvincoDude rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fantasy, read-this-if-it-kills-you, apocalyptic-or-post-apocalyptic, science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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About Kevin Brockmeier

Born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, Brockmeier received his MFA from the Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1997. His stories have been featured in The New Yorker, McSweeny's, Crazyhorse, and The Georgia Review. He is the recipient of an O. Henry Award, the Nelson Algren Award, and a National Endowment of the Arts grant.

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“Anyone who has ever experienced love knows that you can have too much or too little. You can have love that parches, love that defeats. You can have love measured out in the wrong proportions. It's like your sunlight and water - the wrong kind of love is just as likely to stifle hope as it is to nourish it.” — 23 people liked it

“Dreaming was easier than screaming, and screaming was easier than worrying, and worrying was easier than crying, which was what she knew she would be reduced to if she didn’t keep a hard eye on herself.” — 16 people liked it

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