Harlan Vaughn

Here lies a wonderful philosophical play on life & death.

The party invitation said, "Please bring tools to kill yourself a few times." Talk about your RSVP.

What would life be like without death? The bittersweet flavors of life are seasoned by our ever-present awareness of death. Harlan Vaughn plumbs the depths of human psychology in this dramatic plunge into a world where we cannot die, ever. A unique glimpse of human nature and the psychology of mortality, or lack thereof.

The narrative is fairly smooth and chocked full of detail, punctuated by gritty scenes of explicit violence. Readers be warned, there are several horror novel style rip-roaring moments.

There's also a few laughs here and there, and some very memorable lines. One of my favorites: "Do you wanna kill me first?"

Are you curious yet? You should be. I highly recommend this read for anyone who's not squeamish about violence. After reading this novel, I look for good things to come from Harlan Vaughn in the future.… (more)

The premise of this book was incredibly fascinating to start: it takes the popular date of December 21, 2012, which we the reader will recognize as the Mayan date of doom, and transforms it into a world without death.

It started off with an incredible look at the human condition and how the world's entire population would react to not being able to die, being able to regenerate nearly instantly, facing a future of non-growth. I was fascinated and disturbed by the Death Parties, by April's glee at being "murdered" over and over and over again and the delight everyone took in killing one another at these parties. I think the author nailed it at how despondent we would become after initial joy of no more pain, no more death, no more worries. Humans like to be challenged, if we don't have problems we create them for ourselves, etc. There would be an initial surge of violence such as Kelsey's rape and it's wholly disturbing because you are seeing the transformation of people into something baser. But you would be despondent, too, as your brain ages and processes what is happening. Your children can't ever grow up, if you're 9 months pregnant you're pregnant for eternity, etc.

So, the first bit of the book was really good and got you thinking. What if, what if, what if...

After that the story just didn't gel for me. The depth lightened to the point that I felt like I was reading a script. There were storylines that didn't go anywhere. And I suppose I just have a hard time believing that humanity would deteriorate and want to die after only 3 short years. Why wouldn't they look for a solution? The cloud tells them "if they can find a way"!

I can see the government trying to usurp power and control one little zone where things age, etc, but what lost me is that you have this Cloud of Doom who tells you that death has been taken from us...and then it never goes anywhere else. There are threads of plot that I thought just unraveled and didn't conclude where the author could really have picked it up and spun it more along the lines of horror, more science fiction or something. Perhaps I'm looking for something that isn't there?

The ending wasn't what I expected: the characters were set up as the 1% of the world who WANT to live and I expected to find out who/what the cloud was, a solution to creating death once again, etc. I felt like the last half of the book, after the cloud scene, was a bit chaotic and half-told.

All in all, this book was okay. It didn't keep its momentum going, in my opinion, and ended up being a slower read for me, but it did propose a lot of questions of how we the human race would respond to have our inevitable taken from us. It would probably bring great discussion to book groups because of the question it poses!

I got this book from the Read It & Reap group here on goodreads. Thanks for the read!… (more)

Note: I received this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.

While the premise seemed good in the beginning, I almost gave up on this book but I trudged through it til the end. Unfortunately, it did not get any better. While following two sisters, April and Kelsey, after they are not able to die the characterization was one dimensional. The characters are so thoroughly boxed into different roles that there is no variation. The Death Parties turned me off right away. Questions never really get answered about why the Restoration occurred and lots of issues were just glossed over except for the explicit descriptions of violent deaths taking place and how much people enjoyed it.

Also on http://lrjohnson13.blogspot.com/2012/10/here-lies-death-by-harlan-vaughn.html… (more)