I just finished Farrenkopf's short story collection "Haunted ecologies" and decided to invite him to an interview in my Podcast/YouTube-Channel "Literatunnat".
Not a bad idea to read the novel before talking to the author, isn't it?
Definitely not and I had fun. My yearly reading is about 70% Science Fiction, 20% Horror and 10% the rest of the genres out there. Usually, the worldbuilding in a Horror novel is much less developed (and usually not necessary), it's about this world and then a monster or a phantastical spooky element is added.
Not so here. Worldbuilding is complex, because of what happens after death (or at least, a couple of decades or maybe even a couple of hundred years after one's death): the human being becomes a ghost and lives near its grave. In the clothes it was buried (or cremated) in and looking like the last day in its life. For example, there is a ghost couple and the woman seems to be like forty years older than her husband, because she died much, much later.
You can talk to the ghosts and share memories and knowledge, but you cannot touch them. As a Ghost, you lose your senses, but not your emotions. You're able to move only if your grave (and your human remains) move as well. Otherwise, you're stuck in the cemetery.
There's another important thing: Each human being is connected to some ancestor. It could be an aunt, uncle or parent, or some long-ago ancestor you don't even know. And you have to pay for their sins. Depending on how bad the sin was, you pay with a gruesome and early death, but it's also possible that you will live a long life and then a peaceful death. (There are other possibilities, which will spoil too much and I doubt they were mentioned towards the beginning of the novel.)
Usually, the ghost of the ancestor knows to whom they are connected, but some aren't sure (or won't admit their sins) or sometimes it's not yet fixed to whom they are connected.
So you might know when (and how) you'll die, but there's no guarantee.
Dave, the narrator of the novel, wants to know the time of his death, because he wants to propose to his girlfriend Jessica (with whom he had already spent seven years) and maybe start a family. But he does not want to leave her alone after a too short time and that's while he starts researching his family ghosts to find out about his own ending.
There's a lot in here. First, the relationship between Jessica and Dave. Then, the relationship with their flatmate Lenny, a friend of Dave, who behaves like Don Juan de Marco since he knows he has only five years left. Dave struggles with Lenny's behaviour, for Jessica it's unbearable.
Also, the friendship to Dave's recently passed (in a quite brutal and original way) friend Clint ist interesting and his developing friendship to the young Lenore. I also especially liked some side figures (mostly ghosts) and side plots.
About the premise I have to think a bit, but not, because the novel is too ambiguous. It seems more to be the kind of novel which opens lots of thinking rooms for us readers. For one thing, it reminds me of the novel The Measure from Nikki Erlick, where everybody learns about their life span and some kind of discrimination against the "will die young" begins in society. It's not that bad here, but there are scenes between people who fear a brutal ending in the not-so-far-away-future and other ones, who can feel secure for decades. People do get influenced by this knowledge.
The "Do I would want to know?"-question comes to mind (although I already have all the kids I wanted to have and have proposed to the man I wanted to marry).
Also, some other ideas come up while reading: Just take as much pleasure and kindness from the life you do have. No matter how long it might be (same rings true for relationships, either romantical or friendships).
Like any good novel, it's not really about the horror or the fantastical elements in it. It tells me as a reader something about myself. And that might be different from reader to reader.
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