Life sucks, then you die. Then the afterlife sucks, and then you might die again. In the deeply dark comedy Here Goes Nothing by Steve Toltz (Quicksand), readers meet no one who is sure what happens after that.
Angus, who drifted through life mostly via petty crime, is anticipating the birth of his first child when he is murdered by a man who is in love with his wife, Gracie, an unorthodox wedding officiant. Never having believed in any kind of religion or afterlife ("Heaven was a childish dream, Purgatory an obvious metaphor, Hell credible only on earth"), Angus is surprised to find himself in a world beyond death ("It's humiliating how wrong you can be") and, furthermore, one that is every bit as bureaucratic and full of drudgery and unrest as the world he knew. The realm of the living faces the beginning of another pandemic, and a huge influx of the dead creates a situation equivalent to a refugee crisis on the spiritual plane. Angus struggles through banal jobs, lousy apartments and amazingly few answers. When he learns of a machine that will let him haunt the home where he was killed, he devotes even more time to obsessing about Gracie. Circumstances might even give him the chance for revenge.
Toltz's vision of the near future and the afterlife is surreal, sharply funny and as dark as the grave. Fans of noir fiction and quirky thrillers, such as Adam Sternbergh's Shovel Ready, will dig right in. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library