...enchanting ... Like his previous book, the short story collection Hall of Small Mammals, it's richly imaginative, quirky but not twee, and the work of an author who's determined to find the surreal behind the ordinary ... There's a lot going on in The Afterlives, but that's not a bad thing — Pierce's pacing is excellent, and the reader never feels overwhelmed by the increasingly bizarre events in the novel ... Pierce also has a gift for memorable and realistic characters ... The Afterlives is an admirably straight-faced novel, and Pierce writes as if he's allergic to the snide, the ironic and the pseudo-intellectual. It's a deeply generous, compassionate book that asks its readers to open their hearts and treat one another with understanding, even as the world grows more complicated, and more unknowable, every day.
...a pleasant case of a ghost story that gets it both ways — it delivers a satisfying rendering of what that supernatural world might be like, while preserving the sense of mystery that draws us to such yarns in the first place ... Pierce, like every ghost-story writer, knows we crave an unreality to match the humdrum real world we’re stuck in. Unlike many, though, he grasps that we chase that tension not to cross into some 'other side' but to feel steadier on this one.
In the first quarter of the book I was held back from investing too much in the story because it seemed as if the metaphysical rug was about to be pulled out from under us. What kept drawing me in, however, was Pierce’s clear prose and fine eye for emotional detail ... Pierce is brilliant at painting an entire life — encompassing passion, missed opportunities, tragedy — in a few pages ... He also isn’t afraid to pose the biggest questions: How do we deal with loss? What are the limits and possibilities of love? What is the nature of time? Jim and Annie, in pursuit of answers, track down Zinker and her 'reunion machine,' which promises to unite the living and the dead. In The Afterlives, Pierce has worked a similar magic, connecting us to fictional characters who seem, somehow, 100 percent real.
...[a] touching, thought-provoking debut novel ... Part love story and part speculative sci-fi, it’s a meandering, albeit meaningful, look at marriage, technology and ghosts — those of the otherworldly type that may exist but also specters of our past that influence our present ... Fans of The Leftovers, A Ghost Story and others of their metaphysical ilk will find loads of heady stuff in The Afterlives that’ll put them in good spirits.
Pierce uses humor to create an almost paradoxical sensation that affectingly pulses throughout The Afterlives. Jim’s story is funny because it’s so realistic, but it’s also so absurd that it’s impossible ... While the novel remains comedic, a deep, philosophical sentiment also makes itself known in the novel’s second half. Pierce astutely asserts that reckoning with death and the afterlife shouldn’t be avoided because these two things are as essential to the human experience as the very act of living is.
The Afterlives is a mordantly funny and deeply human look at one man’s quest to find out what happens after we die ... [Pierce] displays a nimble sense of humor and wild creativity ... Maybe knowledge of life after death is a futile quest, but Pierce’s intelligent debut proves there’s still something to gain from pursuing it.
...[an] excellent novel ... The Afterlives is sprinkled with Black Mirror-style futuristic touches — like an explosion in popularity of unnerving AI holograms in workplaces and public spaces — which dance along the border of very cool and creepy ... Pierce’s tale unfolds loosely but deliberately, cutting across timelines to weave in the story of what went down in that restaurant’s stairwell once upon a time, and who else, now living or dead, might have been involved. The Afterlives is as much a dialogue and an attempt at reconciliation between faith and science as it is a contemplation of the opportunities of second chances.
Pierce wants us to follow Jim all the way and come out with something profound, but not too worrying or blasphemous … Jim is our guide into the strangeness that lurks in the fringier edges of science, a regular guy who is drawn closer and closer to the extraordinary in his search for answers. It all happens against the backdrop of rapidly changing technology: sentient holograms that come to take over customer-service jobs and a machine that lets you talk to the dead. These are weighty subjects, but The Afterlives approaches them with humor, suspense, and even a little sex … The book’s pull comes from the mash-up of all the existential concerns a person might face. Each little piece doesn’t tell us quite as much as seeing them as parts of a whole does.
Thomas Pierce approaches the interplay of technology and immortality with...subtlety in his debut novel … [Pierce] wanders wherever the spirit moves him, which may frustrate readers looking for drama, but I was enchanted by his thoughtful ruminations and wry comments about church and spirituality. Intercalary chapters about the haunted house’s original residents vibrate with ectoplastic energy.
His work has a quirky sensibility that recalls Lorrie Moore or George Saunders, an ability to bring the unquestionably weird into the path of daily life without ever seeming forced. However, while The Afterlives concerns the idea of ghosts, it is very much more than a ghost story ... Yes, there’s a lot going on in this novel, but Pierce’s confident storytelling and fine characterisation mean that we always feel in safe hands. One of the satisfactions of The Afterlives is the way in which the author resists easy solutions to the mysteries he sets up ... The Afterlives will raise the hairs on the back of your neck and remind you that another world may be just a heartbeat away.
The complex relationship between the normal and the paranormal is also central to The Afterlives by Thomas Pierce, a novel set in the near future, where both church services and most clerical jobs are performed by holograms ... His investigation of this phenomenon leads him to an experimental physicist who has begun to successfully explore life after death. The relationship between death and love is at the heart of this book, and it’s at its best when most romantic.
...a nearly perfect embodiment of the ways paradox constitutes the most compelling art. The novel sparks with matchstrikes of humor and stares down sober questions. It is a romance and a speculative fiction and a philosophical inquiry. It’s also a delight to inhabit, a literary structure so cleverly wrought you search in vain for signs of the epic labor that had to have gone into its sills and stairs ... The novel is constructed as a postulation, winding its way along a double helix of narratives stretching from past lives to future society. Each step brings the reader to a turn affording double views ... The plot itself is built expressly for the purpose of carrying a doubled load: the story is also about the nature of stories; the book is about reading this book ... Pierce’s novel maintains an exquisite gyroscopic balance between sentiment and idea, postmodern self-referentiality and science fiction’s nostalgia, gee-whiz plot points and elemental human cares.
His work has a quirky sensibility that recalls Lorrie Moore or George Saunders, an ability to bring the unquestionably weird into the path of daily life without ever seeming forced.
Pierce uses humor to create an almost paradoxical sensation that affectingly pulses throughout The Afterlives ... There’s a genuine sense of pain—a strong, dire one—that Pierce captures in The Afterlives.
What Pierce does with all these tropes is make them boring. One of the experts Jim consults insists that nothing in the universe exists more than 93 percent of the time. This would be a more chilling observation if Jim, himself, was ever fully real. Nothing about him—his job, his friendships, his marriage—seems worthy of sustained attention. The narrative is all just a lot of plodding exposition as Jim fumbles along. He has almost no inner life, which is especially unfortunate since he is not just the protagonist, but also the narrator. There’s a second, related tale woven into Jim’s story. It is, at some moments, slightly more compelling than the main text, but it mostly just makes a slow novel slower. Timeless questions. Tedious answers.
Pierce’s breezy style only partially saves the overlong novel from a lack of urgency affecting almost all of its numerous story lines. When it gels, the novel manages a rare and significant clarity about the effects of death on the living (particularly couples, aware that all romance is ultimately temporary), but otherwise it seems unsure which story it wants to tell.
