The Brief History of the Dead

By: Kevin Brockmeier

Narrated by: Richard Poe

Length: 8 hrs and 33 mins

Publisher's summary

Award-winning author Kevin Brockmeier delivers a spellbinding, supernatural tale of love, memories, and human connection. All residents of the City have recently died, and they will remain in the City only as long as someone still living on Earth remembers them. On Earth, however, the population has been devastated by a terrible pandemic. Laura Byrd, isolated at an Antarctic research station, may be the only person to have survived the pandemic. But she's running out of time and supplies, and her memories are fading.

Brilliant in concept and execution, The Brief History of the Dead is a spectacular achievement that lingers in the mind long after the final word.

©2006 Kevin Brockmeier (P)2006 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Beautiful, delicate." (Publishers Weekly)

Mediocre at best

I kept waiting for something to happen, the characters were interesting and I really liked the storyline. But the end was terrible, a huge let down. It went nowhere.

A long journey to a disappointing end.

This is a well written story about the connections we all share in life and ultimately in death. I found the story to meander along like a river with a few rapids thrown in but ultimately arriving at a predictable and pointless ending.

Where was his editor?

What an interesting concept! What a weak result!

Your questions about the characters and the afterworld(s) are never answered. Loose ends are never tied up. Huge sections are tedious meditations or pointless reminisceses.

Avoid. Avoid. Avoid.

Deathly slow book

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Barely a professional novel, this moves at the pace of a snail crossing a sticky floor. Despite much of the novel being a one character show, there's barely any character development. It's hard to even figure out how the author uses all those time-consuming words while accomplishing so little with them. In theory I love the idea of the novel, but wake me up when it's over.

Would you ever listen to anything by Kevin Brockmeier again?

No.

What does Richard Poe bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

Richard Poe is actually a really good reader. You couldn't completely tell it from this, but I've heard him read books before and he was one of the things that recommended this purchase to me. His voice has a lot of gravitas and feeling to it. Everything he reads sounds smarter because he read it, which suggests how braindead this book must actually be.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Anger that I wasted the time. Sadness that I spent the money.

Any additional comments?

Stay away.

Dissapointed

The book seemed to consist of long, detailed, drawn-out descriptions focusing on minutia with no true plot or direction tying them together. In the end no real questions are answered and nothing is resoloved, which is disappointing since the idea behind the book is clever and novel. So much potential, but ultimately so much of my time was wasted listening to this book.

Not worth it

This book never gets going. The writer has put a lot of work into something that is not understandable. Look for something else to spend your time with.

If you have absolutely nothing else to do...

I was intriqued by the idea of the after life and kept waiting for something to develop during this story. After 8 hours, it never did develop. I will be far more careful in my future selections. I really felt cheated at the end. Where can I get my 8 hours back?!

The only horror is how boring this title was

I picked up this book based on a thread on reddit suggesting some horror titles and while others have been great, this was so disappointing. It has an interesting premise that when you die you pass into an afterlife city where everyone remains until there is no one living who remembers them, it then becomes clear that there is something unsettling going on with people disappearing as they try to determine who is living that they have in common and what is going on with people on Earth. The truth felt obvious to me at about hour 3 or so while the characters appeared oblivious and incapable of deducing the problem, the book then continues to meander in this way with dead characters trying to discover the truth and the living character searching for salvation

I kept waiting and hoping that some twist or climax was going to be found but the remainder of the book goes nowhere and fizzles out. Perhaps that is the point, the inevitability of oblivion for the individual, but perhaps we could make that point much more succinctly or in a way that is less frustrating for the listener/reader? In any case, fans of the horror genre will likely find little entertainment here

Anticlimactic

I kept waiting for this to get better, waiting to see where the author was going and waiting and waiting and waiting.
Like the dead in this book, I had no idea where this was going next and after 8 hours, i still haven't a clue🤦.