DEATH AND OTHER OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

Death goes on sabbatical, and all hell breaks out on earth.

Tired of all the petty indignities that go with her office, from the tradition that forces her to wear a shapeless black sack and schlep around an ungainly scythe to the tedium of listening to all that weeping and wailing from the people she ferries on the final Journey, Death requests a leave of absence from her job. To her surprise, the Boss—engineer of the Plan that determines the fate of every living being on Earth—agrees. Death is less surprised than her sister, Life, and installs her temporarily in the body of an attractive young woman. That turns out to be exactly the kind of corporeal presence that gives Death access to a wide range of human experiences, including hunger, surprise, confusion, beauty, boredom, frustration, and, of course, love. Dapunt combines mystery—Death learns of a series of unplanned demises that she must investigate—eschatology, and melodrama into a heady mix that may challenge some readers’ patience. The longer Death sojourns on earth, the closer the world seems to spin toward a modern-day apocalypse: What begins as an attack on individuals by deadly parasites and toxic spiders escalates into cosmic events that wipe out scores of rats and colonies of ants in the blink of an eye. Readers familiar with the biblical book of Revelation will have a leg up on understanding Dapunt’s teleology, but a passing acquaintance with the latest issue of Cosmopolitan will also help.

Definitely for readers with a taste for the eclectic.