You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) by Andrew Stanek
Overall Rating: 
I downloaded You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) on my Kindle Fire a couple months ago when it was temporarily free. It definitely isn’t my normal read, but I decided to give it a try because the premise amused me.
You are Dead (Sign Here Please) is a delightfully wonky comedy about a world in which heaven is run by bureaucrats who file paperwork for absolutely everything in existence. When Nathan, our protagonist, is murdered by a serial killer and sent to heaven, it is one of these same bureaucrats who asks him to sign his 21B. When Nathan refuses, he is sent back to life until the bureaucrats can find a way to trick him into signing his form – or prove he’s insane so they can sign it for him.
Nathan’s hometown of Dead Donkey is wild and bizarre. It’s such a terrible place to be that the local travel agencies make most of their money by luring tourists in and then charging more to get them out once they see what a terrible place it is. The mayor’s office is located in a urinal and something is always on fire.
Overall, I found this book amusing, light-hearted, bizarre, and fun – and sometimes alarming! If you enjoy books like the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series, then you will love this book.
Pros: You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) is written with a very tongue-in-cheek style that had me laughing out loud many times. One night I actually woke my husband up in the middle of the night to read quotes to him because they were just too funny not to share. The premise is clever and the writing was so absurd that I really had no idea what to expect by the end.
Cons: The characters in You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) are very one-dimensional. I didn’t really like any of the characters enough to actually care what happened to them. In fact, I found myself more often rooting for the bureaucrats than for Nathan. Maybe that says more about me than the book. But the characters felt either too bland or too ridiculous for any emotional connection. I know that this is a comedy, but I would have liked to believe the characters were actually characters, rather than plot devices. The writer went to such great pains to paint the city of Dead Donkey as this awful, wacky cesspool of violence that it was hard to understand why Nathan wanted to go back.
Favorite Quote: “For a moment, Ian stood there dumbstruck. He looked confused, like a dog that has just seen the cat it was chasing escape by helicopter.”
This book appears to have two sequels: You Are a Ghost (Sign Here Please), and You Are Doomed (Sign Here Please).
You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) can be purchased on Amazon.com. It is available in both ebook and paperback.
Leslie Colleen “L.C.” Ireland is an arts educator and writer. Her first novel, Fatal Heir, was published in Oct. 2015. She currently lives in Ogden, UT with her amazing husband.
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You Are Dead (Sign Here Please) by Andrew Stanek
Dec 29, 2016
You are Dead (Sign Here Please) is a delightfully wonky comedy about a world in which heaven is run by bureaucrats who file paperwork for absolutely everything in existence.
