THE SADEIEST

In Spencer’s debut novel, a deceased man’s spirit helps souls escape their expiring bodies.

Williams may be dead but his soul lives on. Another spirit named Henreich, who appears to be a teenage boy, is there to tutor him on his new afterlife profession. Williams and Henreich are Sadeiests—a title that’s a portmanteau of the words sadist and poltergeist. They help trapped souls depart bodies that are on the verge of death; if a soul doesn’t manage to do so before the body’s demise, then it dies, as well. The job can be a harrowing ordeal, as when they aid victims of a vicious serial killer named Sinclair. Henreich quickly grasps that Williams is special when one woman’s soul shows him the life that she lived with her ailing husband—an apparently unprecedented occurrence. In a concurrent story, Death meets 12-year-old John, who can see precisely when and how people will die. He tells the boy, whom he calls “Harbinger,” about the Seven Horsemen of the Apocalypse; Death is one of them, of course, but it’s the other six who wish to battle one another until only two remain, with mortals as “collateral damage.” Spencer’s dense narrative also sublimely addresses abstract notions, such as redemption—each saved soul lessens the Sadeiests’ accumulated sin, which gradually makes them look younger. The novel can be cheeky at times, but it’s more often profound, as Williams develops growing empathy for the dying. The deaths themselves tend to be brutal, however, in part due to Sinclair’s regular appearances. The author’s concise prose ably introduces myriad characters but keeps some of them mysterious. As a result, questions linger at the end, although Spencer may be saving the answers for a planned sequel. Dyer’s crisp, black-and-white line art concludes each chapter—a remnant of the book’s genesis as an unrealized graphic novel. Although the events in the text and illustrations don’t match up, the wordless panels reveal early incarnations of Williams and Henreich.

An unflinching but introspective tale of what happens after death.