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The Postmortal (2011)

by Drew Magary(Favorite Author)

3.8 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0143119826 (ISBN13: 9780143119821)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Penguin Group USA

review 1: This book started out as an interesting look at the downside of immortality for everyone. Clearly it would be awesome to live longer, but few people take time to look at our limited resources, how many kids you might end up having, how the power of immortality is going to change things like marriage and how we treat each other. This book did an interesting job of delving into some of that. Then I hit the second half. While Postmortal was never going to be cheery, somewhere around the middle it turned into some guy's sick snuff fantasies put down on paper. I'm not sure what role these horrific encounters and acid-trip dreams played in furthering the plot or developing the characters (note: the characters do not noticeably develop), but I can assure you they played a ro... morele in me being disgusted by what I was reading. The sister was the most relatable character for myself, although I am not a suburban housewife. She resists getting the "cure" for a while, then gets it once everyone else has, and is fairly burdened by the results. More importantly, she isn't some gorgeous one-dimensional girlfriend that our author eventually kills in some violent playout that is possibly (?) supposed to pull on our heartstrings. But of course her appearances are rare, and only for a couple pages at a time. When I finished my fiance described this book most concisely, "it's a dude-brah*, writing about another dude-brah." Evidence for this lies in the fact that the author dedicated this book to his wife and kids (I'm a little horrified), then in the acknowledgments, admits to being "a self-absorbed jackass" but that's okay, because didn't you know all authors were? And follows it up by saying he loves his wife and children so much "that I even made sure this book has no penis drawings in it." And that, I think, says it all.*Dude-brah: see a frat guy who sits around drinking, variating his exposition between two terms, "dude" and "brah".
review 2: Hmm... I guess post-apocalyptic (or pre-apocalyptic as the back of the book describes the story) is not really my thing. There was a lot interesting about this, but mostly it fed into all of my freak out about over-population so I didn't even find the premise (a cure for aging) a good (or interesting) thing. It did move along nicely, there were interesting set ups. The main character was likeable. And, it did give a sense of what it would be like to live forever - mostly by skipping huge sections of his life which left me wondering, hey where did the time go. less

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