“Well, honey, maybe you should pretend to be dead.”
“What?”
The gunman looked up from the wounded on the floor, and I could see the glitter of eyes through the two holes in the mask. He was staring straight at me.
“If there’s no way to get to safety,” she said carefully, “maybe you should lie down and not move.”
He holstered his pistol and raised the automatic rifle again.
“Thank you,” I said, and let myself fall as the gun roared smoke and noise.
We’re introduced to Lizzie Scofield, the main character of the book-within-a-book “Afterworlds”, in the middle of a terrorist attack while she’s on the phone with a desperately calm 911 operator who gives her the last-second advice that saves her life: pretend to be dead. Lizzie drops to the floor, praying that the shooter won’t finish her off like the dozens around her, and somehow wills herself into the underworld. She meets the love of her life in the space between worlds, and then spends the rest of the book trying to find her place in a dangerous new reality where the dead have literally been with her since birth, and where things can happen to you that are a lot worse than dying.
The writer of the Young Adult book “Afterworlds” is Darcy Patel, a teenage writer just graduated from high school. Darcy wrote the draft of her first novel in one month, and manages to get a publisher to sign her to a two-book deal for over a hundred thousand dollars. The alternating chapters of Scott Westerfeld’s book Afterworlds follows Darcy’s choice to move to the big city, living off her advance while she completes the revisions for the book’s final draft, all the while getting to hang out with a supportive crowd of fellow writers. And even though the book she’s writing is filled with ghosts, psychopomps, kingdoms in the afterlife, and a mystical river between worlds, it actually feels like less of a fantasy world than the idyllic year Darcy spends in the Young Adult Writers Heaven in New York City.
Lizzie’s first chapter is actually the second in the book, and anyone with triggers of terrorists’ attacks needs to be warned: it’s really rough. The attack is everything we’ve all come to be afraid of with mass shootings nowadays: completely random and nothing that anyone could have planned for or avoided. Lizzie has to live with the aftermath of being the only one to survive the attack, along with having to live with an irresponsible father, a mother who’s spent her entire life worrying about her safety (for what turns out to be very good reasons), the fallout from a serial killer, and all the other mess that comes from a world where sometimes bad things happen, not just to good people, but to everyone.
Balancing that out is all the fascinating things that happen to her now that she’s a psychopomp (don’t worry if that title seems awkward; Lizzie feels exactly the same way about it, but she can’t think of a better word). She can see and speak with ghosts (recognizable by by the way shadows don’t seem to apply), she can step between worlds in order to step through walls, and she can see the memories (or ghosts of memories) of places and buildings as well as people. Lizzie ends up falling in love with Yamaraj, the thousand-year-old fourteen-year-old who’s made it his mission to save the dead from fading away when people forget them. Probably one of the most effective parts of the story for me is how Lizzie sends herself over to the afterworld. Sometimes being near Yamaraj or a ghost can do it, but other times Lizzie has to repeat the words of the 911 operator during the terrorist attack as a kind of mantra, and it gave me a chill every time, every time, she speaks the words out loud. Compared to the world of “Afterworlds”, Darcy’s adventures of being a Young Adult writer in the “real” world are less convincing.
“When does Pyromancer come out?”
“This September.” Imogen breathed out through her teeth. “Finally.”
“You’re lucky. Mine’s not out till next fall.”
“Being an author sucks, doesn’t it? It’s like telling a joke and nobody laughs for two years.”
And that’s not to say the story was bad. It was actually fun to see Darcy make a life for herself in New York. Westerfeld has always been an excellent creator of believable characters; I enjoyed the interactions between Darcy and her too-smart-for-her-own-good little sister, and the conversations that Darcy would have with her two best friends from high school, Carla and Sagan (and yes, I thought that was a not very clever joke on the author’s part, but the characters themselves make a joke about it later, so that made it all right.) The reader also gets to see inside an idealized version of the publishing world, something Westerfeld must be pretty familiar with after writing two runaway successful YA series. And there were several great scenes, one of my favorites being the trip across the Brooklyn bridge with a terrified Darcy driving, and her girlfriend laughing up a storm in the trunk after insisting on being locked there because the kidnapping scene in her own book “lacked realism”.
Not only that, but the interaction between Darcy and Lizzie’s chapters were a pretty cool experiment on Westerfeld’s part. Darcy’s chapters would foreshadow events in Lizzie’s chapters, and events in the fictional (well, slightly more fictional) world of “Afterworlds” would echo conversations and suggestions by fellow writers in New York. We only get to read the final polished chapters of “Afterworlds”, but we occasionally see mentions of sections that were edited out of existence at the direction of Darcy’s editor, something which echoes what happens to ghosts in “Afterworlds” when everyone who might remember them is gone.
What kept me from completely buying Darcy’s story was that she is extremely lucky in everything she does. This is her first novel, and suddenly she’s got a contract, a hundred thousand dollars to live off of, and parents that don’t put up too much resistance to their eighteen-year-old daughter putting off college and moving to NYC by herself? She finds a to-die-for apartment in Chinatown on the first day she goes apartment hunting (I can hear every person I’ve ever known who’s lived in New York calling BS on that one), is surrounded by successful writers who love her book, and a beautiful author confesses her feelings to Darcy at a party and the two start a very sweet and totally out-of-the-blue relationship. She lives a charmed life, to the point where I was afraid Westerfeld was going to fall back on that worn-out literary trope “And It Was All Just A Dream”. (He doesn’t, thank God. I probably would have thrown the book out the window.)
Darcy never has any real problems other than the ones she makes for herself. And while some of these are fairly typical for a teenager (running through her budget too fast, putting things off until she misses a deadline, having to confess to the snooping that she promised she wouldn’t do), most of her problems come from being insecure about all the good things that happen to her. It was a little too much like a beautiful Mary Sue who’s biggest “flaw” is thinking that she isn’t pretty.
Comparing Darcy’s story to fan-fiction isn’t quite accurate though, it’s really more like a daydream. Westerfeld was able to indulge in a pretty fantasy of what it would be like for a teenager to discover herself, discover New York, and best of all discover the joy in writing. The image of Darcy and her girlfriend in their unrealistically perfect New York apartment, staying up until all hours just writing, talking about literature and bouncing ideas off of each other, all of that sounded pretty close to an idea of heaven for me. I have to wonder if Westerfeld was writing what he thought Lizzie’s dream of a perfect “normal” life would be like, just as Darcy was writing her idea of an adventurous world where becoming an adult involved more than keeping to a budget and buying cleaning supplies. Or maybe Westerfeld just wanted to lure young adults into writing, to play up a world where the best part about being a writer isn’t getting paid a lot of money or signing books for a legion of fans, it’s getting to connect with other people who write.