Why Do We Keep Writing About Life After Death?
The afterlife provides an opportunity to ponder our biggest existential questions: Your weekly guide to the best in books
When the world is at war, and you’ve endured night after night of fires and bombs going off all around you, how do you make sense of your own survival? For the unnamed narrator of R. P. Lister’s short story “”—published in in 1960—the solution is to transform the experience into a sort of tall tale, playing up the comedic moments over the real fear, long after the danger has passed. After hearing the whistle of a bomb during the London Blitz, the narrator races up to the roof—but,thatthe older man—despite tracking him down from the grave—will go away. The chaos of the city around him becomes less important as he relays asides about the spirit’s supposed prior messages.
