I just finished re-reading Neal Barrett, Jr.’s The Hereafter Gang. It’s probably been twenty years or more since I first read it and I wanted to see if it held up. Did it? Mostly. It seems my memory of the book was primarily of the last third, the final act. My response this time to parts of the first two acts, filled primarily with unlikeable characters behaving…poorly, was less light-heartedly accepting than younger Ken’s had been. Maybe I’m getting too sensitive in my old age.
But I quibble. Don’t let that put you off. It is still a remarkable book, a sort of late 1980’s gonzo, Buddhist Pilgrim’s Progress or Dante’s Inferno, with Billy the Kid and a jailbait runaway as a pair of psychopomps instead of Virgil, leading a soul — who hasn’t realized he’s died — through Texas, to cross the Red River (instead of the Styx) into the promised land in Oklahoma. Only there, in a sort of paradise largely peopled by outlaws and German WWI aces, does our lost soul discover that rather than Heaven, the town is a sort of waystation between reincarnations, one to which souls return multiple times before moving on to a higher plane. And he must discover who he was in a prior existence before he can — if he chooses — be reincarnated.
The book is saturated with loving nostalgia for early Twentieth Century Americana. The references are exhaustive and evocative. The style, brilliantly maintained throughout, is a lot of fun. If you don’t bounce off it at the beginning, it will carry you through with a grin on your face. It is hopeful and oddly uplifting. Just don’t try to work out the logistics of its internal theology; you’ll spoil the fun.
If you are not in the mood for magical realism, you could pick up a copy of my latest novel, a science-fiction action/adventure novel, Twilight Galaxy: Dekason.