SOUL TRAIN

This debut fantasy sees a teenager afforded a cautionary train ride through the circles of hell.

Seventeen-year-old Joshua Holmes regains consciousness on a train platform. He has no memory of how he got there—only a splitting headache and a ticket. When he boards the train, the older woman beside him tells him he’s on “the ride of a lifetime.” The train is taking the dead to their afterlives in heaven and, mostly, hell. Joshua is in limbo—one of the rare few who will wake from near-death experiences and resume their lives only to take the train ride again years later. Joshua’s ticket is his guarantee of safety. Others will try to steal it. Nonetheless, the mysterious conductor encourages him to mix with his fellow passengers. Joshua strikes up friendships with a trans girl and an anorexic social media influencer. And while he cannot understand why his new pals deserve a place in hell, he can’t remember what brought him to his near death. Will he survive his “trip of a lifetime” and learn what he needs to make that life worthwhile? Husvar writes in the third person, past tense, employing a simple but enthusiastic narrative style. The prose is descriptive yet often flawed, one recurring solecism being the use of past-tense verb constructions for the observed present: “Small murmurs erupted as everyone watched people in all-white clothing walked onto the station from other trains that were parked on different platforms.” In addition, the text is littered with odd, mannered dialogue (“ ‘I’m really about to ask for said management honestly,’ Clarice jibbed”) and off-kilter word choices (“came to thought” rather than came to mind). This lack of polish robs the story of pace and impact—which is unfortunate, because conceptually there is much here to like. The train ride is quite wondrous, and the characters exhibit a surprising depth given their circumstances. Although Joshua’s flashbacks come a little late to be truly effective, he cultivates a nuanced view in keeping with the author’s notion of hell as a place people define within themselves. The various circles defy stereotypes, and most of the train’s passengers are shown to have worth. All told, the book evinces a moody, murky imagination perhaps more in keeping with a visual medium. (The story would make an excellent anime series.)

A visually evocative but uneven tale about the afterlife.