THE UNNATURAL

Much of the humor is as stiff as the corpses in this weak satirical debut. Quirks abound, and the subject is certainly an original one, but this modern fairy tale about homegrown embalmer Andy Archway rarely works. Discovered by famed funerary scout Wake Wakefield setting up one of his trademark tableaux in the barn behind his parents' house, Archway seems destined to revolutionize the funeral business: Rather than simply placing corpses in caskets, he arranges them in diorama-like settings that recall their major interests. Wakefield arranges a scholarship for Archway at the Thomas Holmes University of Embalming and Funerary Practices, promising employment with funeral maestro P.T. Sunnyside in Rancho Norman Rockwell, Calif., upon graduation. The text alternates bumpily between satirizing baseball (e.g., the title, Archway's participation on his school's competitive embalming team) and spoofing the funeral business (Sunnyside and his arch rivals, the Drabford brothers, literally feuding over dead bodies). This lack of focus is not helped by Archway's change in directions: Initially his gift is artistic, but he soon becomes involved with trying to break the speed-embalming record. The characters are fairly well fleshed out, but their personalities are random rather than organic to the story. Archway's relationship with a woman who carves tombstones, for example, gains nothing from the fact that she is Mexican. The action takes place in a vaguely modern time period whose fuzziness adds to the plot's lack of definition. Competition in the funeral business may very well be cutthroat, but as presented here the idea of workers toiling to build a gigantic pyramid of synthetic stones under the supervision of an Oxford- educated Egyptologist seems bizarre rather than funny. Too many passages cause the reader's head to shake, not in amusement but in confusion. A clever idea that buries itself.