Mal Caldera is a former rockstar, kind of a wild party girl, and the black sheep of her very Catholic family (what’s that like?). And as you might guess from the title, she is also very dead.
Overall, she’s sort of fine with it, at least as much as one can be. She’s mainly focused on figuring out where she is. She senses that she’s in “the terminal,” a sort of in-between space between upstairs and downstairs. And she’d be fine with staying here and doing the dead thing were it not for one person: her sister Cris. Mal is wracked with guilt for leaving her behind to deal with her death and their religious zealot of a mother, especially because her death is being called a suicide when it was really—Mal thinks?—an accident.
She watches Cris go through the motions: picking out the clothes she’ll be buried in, arranging the funeral, rummaging through her apartment as if looking for proof that she didn’t die by suicide, or maybe something that confirms that she did. So Mal has what one would call the unfinished business of a ghost, except she can’t figure out how to communicate with her sister.
Meanwhile, she is meeting other ghosts who are sort of showing her the ropes of the afterlife, ghosts who party at this haunted mansion called The Haunt and repeatedly remind Mal that making contact with the living is forbidden. There are rules! But Mal is determined to get through to her sister and enlists the help of a medium named Ren to do so. He’s reluctant to help but relents, and they begin to put together a plan for Mal to communicate with Cris from beyond the grave. But also… they are beginning to wonder what could have been if they’d only met each other while Mal was still alive.
This book is moving, funny, absurd, heartbreaking, then funny again (“Don’t look in that drawer!”—too real). Mal is flawed and a little prickly, but most relatable when she’s vulnerable enough to admit that she feels. The story explores the particular kind of pain we feel when we’re forced to grieve someone we had more to say to, more to learn from, someone we had unresolved issues with, and more love to give. It’s quirky and quippy and not the downer you might expect a book on death to be. In fact, I found it comforting to spend time with. It reminded me that there’s healing to be had even in loss.
TW: addiction, alcohol abuse, suicide, mental illness