Afterlife
Marcus Sakey, 2017
Amazon Publishing
318 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781477848401
Summary
Between life and death lies an epic war, a relentless manhunt through two worlds…and an unforgettable love story.
The last thing FBI agent Will Brody remembers is the explosion—a thousand shards of glass surfing a lethal shock wave.
He wakes without a scratch.
The building is in ruins. His team is gone. Outside, Chicago is dark. Cars lie abandoned. No planes cross the sky. He’s relieved to spot other people—until he sees they’re carrying machetes.
Welcome to the afterlife.
Claire McCoy stands over the body of Will Brody. As head of an FBI task force, she hasn’t had a decent night’s sleep in weeks. A terrorist has claimed eighteen lives and thrown the nation into panic.
Against this horror, something reckless and beautiful happened. She fell in love…with Will Brody.
But the line between life and death is narrower than any of us suspect—and all that matters to Will and Claire is getting back to each other.
From the author of the million-copy bestselling Brilliance Trilogy comes a mind-bending thriller that explores our most haunting and fundamental question: What if death is just the beginning?
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974
• Where—Flint, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Marcus Sakey is an American award-winning novelist, originally of crime thrillers and later speculative fiction. Most notably, he wrote The Brilliance Trilogy (2013-2016), a mixture of futurism, technology, genetics, and more.
Sakey was born in Flint, Michigan, where he attended the University of Michigan (1992–1996) with a double major in communication and political science. Following graduation, he worked in advertising, marketing, tv, and graphic design, once owning his own design studio in Atlanta. That 10-year-long interlude, as he says on his website, was the perfect background for a crime writer—it allowed him "plenty of exposure to liars and thieves."
Eventually let go from his last advertising job—a job he disliked and had already decided to leave—Sakey collected a severance package and spent the next year reading. After a year, he began writing, and although he hadn't set out to become a crime writer, he took a look around and realized that crime sold.
A year later, in 2007, his debut crime novel, The Blade Itself, was published. It was featured as a New York Times Editor's Pick and named one of Esquire Magazine's 5 Best Reads of that year. Best of all, it sold…enabling Sakey to devote himself full time to writing.
To research his crime novels, which are are set on the south side of Chicago, Sakey shadowed homicide detectives, gang cops, and interviewed soldiers. He rappelled with SWAT teams, hung out with bank robbers, and even dissected a brain.
The switch from the world of crime fiction to sci-fi came several years later and involved a hiking trip with writer pal Blake Crouch where the two bounced around new approaches to their novels. More ideas came as a result of his wife's professional interest in autism. From autism it was a short leap to savants (think Dustin Hoffman in The Rain Man) and eventually to the idea of "brilliants" or "abnorms," the fictional characters in The Brilliance Trilogy. Sakey describes the basis of the series in a Huffington Post interview:
Starting in the 1980s, one percent of the world's population was born with savant gifts—ways of thinking, categorizing, and dealing with the world—far exceeding those of ordinary people. They didn't possess superpowers, but the most powerful could do things like sense patterns in the stock market, or be the strategic equivalent of Einstein. Some had the ability to recognize facial features or bodily movements, allowing them to discern motives and hidden intentions of other people.
In addition to his novels, Marcus was the host and writer of the Hidden City on Travel Channel, for which he endured pepper spray and dog attacks. Sakey lives with his wife and daughter in Chicago. (Adapted from various online sources, including the author's website.)
Book Reviews
So what do you get if you cross The Lovely Bones with Netflix’s The Walking Dead? (Wait, you haven’t watched TWD? Too busy waiting for the next Game of Thrones?) What you get is Afterlife — Marcus Sakey’s smart, provocative, though sometimes silly novel. But one thing is certain: it’s unputdownable.… The premise — the idea of two worlds, the living and the dead, co-existing on separate planes, right alongside one another — is nicely done. And there’s good fun to be had. READ MORE ……
Philip J. Adler - LitLovers
(Starred review.) [A] remarkably conceived and passionately realized supernatural thriller.… Balancing lyric romance and altruistic self-sacrifice with horrifying scenes of cannibalism and wrenching violence, Sakey comes up with a fascinating answer to the eternal question of why humans exist.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Afterlife is simultaneously a beautiful love story, a grim tale of apocalyptic conflict, and an opportunity for an insightful writer to ruminate on the eternal verities. Great appeal across genres.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] disturbing book born in dark times but one in which Sakey employs all his storytelling gifts to craft a noodle-bender of the first order. A love story enmeshed in a twisty thriller that peels back the universe to see what lies beneath.
Kirkus Reviews
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