*The cover says, “A terrifying novel of undying love…” and I have no clue what that is in reference to. There is no dead lover trope here.

A beloved basketball coach and teacher arrives home after a great day in public education. Yet, it feels like something is watching him. When he notices his duffel bag is much heavier than he remembered, he is so terrified his heart explodes.

The coach’s death leaves an open position into which Lee and his wife, Jessie, can position themselves. Though Lee is used to a much bigger public school, he’s thrilled he’ll be both teaching and coaching basketball in this new town. However, the couple come with grief; an accident during which Lee was driving left Jessie blind. It’s obvious Neiderman used a character’s blindness to his advantage, for Jessie can hear things that aren’t there, and sometimes she can feel what is really under a seemingly friendly handshake. For instance, Lee doesn’t immediately tell Jessie the house they’re renting is across from a cemetery, but she can hear the dead and figures it out.

Furthermore, Neiderman makes Jessie a cheerful disabled person, which I believe is a trope. She’s neither mad nor hindered, easily memorizing how many steps from place to place and where everything is in the house they just moved into. Between her attitude and extra-sensory perception, I believe the story was more paranormal than offensive to blind people:

Of course, he had anticipated that the accident and her subsequent blindness would change her; he had expected her to become bitter if not frustrated and full of self-pity. Instead she became oddly mysterious, often uttering things that seemingly made no sense. And those voices! It gave him the jitters how she could look up suddenly and say, “Who’s here, Lee? Who’s in the kitchen?” or “Who’s out in the hall?”

In essence, Neiderman uses Jessie’s blindness to write about my favorite kind of horror: the stuff you don’t see. You smell death, hear the graveyard chatter, feel the rubbery bones in a handshake. A few characters are human, but after a near-death experience, they come back different: more aggressive, more sexual. Jessie is warned, “When your husband dies… don’t let them bring him back.” Really, the author is skilled at writing spooky scenes, and some more terrifying than others. Both Lee and Jessie are tempted to give into what the evil thinks are their most intimate desires. Will temptation win out? Jessie falls back on her lapsed faith, whereas Lee is more susceptible to straying, so we do get a non-religious religion theme in After Life. In a way, the novel felt like a crossover of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist.

Based on whose hand Jessie shakes, readers are alerted to who feels like a corpse and who has a human warmth. Are the dead and living conspiring, gaslighting Jessie into think she’s imagining it all, or are there decent humans left in this small town? An enjoyable read with a few intense scenes of creeping dread!

books of winter 🎄❄️⛄

• Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools by Jonathan Kozol
• Monster: A Fan’s Dilemma by Claire Deder (DNF)
• This is Not a Book about Benedict Cumberbatch by Tabitha Carvan
• Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer
• Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho
• Suggs Black Backtracks by Martha Ann Spencer (DNF)
• Paradise Rot by Jenny Hval (DNF)
• The Lost Girls by Allison Brennan (#11)
• Deliverance by James Dickey
• How to Save a Misfit by Ellen Cassidy
• The Road to Helltown by S.M. Reine (Preternatural Affairs series #9) (finished — special review forthcoming at a later date)
• The Man Who Shot Out My Eye is Dead by Chanelle Benz (DNF)
• At Wit’s End by Erma Bombeck (DNF)
• Touched by Kim Kelly (paused)
• After Life by Andrew Neiderman
• The New York trilogy by Paul Auster
• Devil’s Call by J. Danielle Dorn
• Jaws by Peter Benchley
• All of Me by Venise Berry
• Minding the Store: Great Literature About Business from Tolstoy to Now edited by Robert Coles and Albert LaFarge
• Awakened by Laura Elliott