Gripping story more about life than death

Review: Afterworld

Dominic Mathers seems like a normal teenage boy except, of course, he’s the hero of a young adult novel, so we shouldn’t expect him or his story to be too “normal.”

Just as the reader is getting to know him, Dominic finds himself dead and starting out on a series of adventures he could have barely imagined. Afterworld (Allen & Unwin) tells the story of his exploration, mission and battles to survive and escape Necropolis, the strange city of the dead.

It’s a gripping story that must suggest comparisons with The Hunger Games and, by its descriptions of a shadowy in-between world, C S Lewis’ The Great Divorce, perhaps with a little bit of The Shack thrown in as well. But this story is more about life than about death. So many of the people of Necropolis seem to have settled into patterns of life not so dissimilar from the world Dominic had known. It’s a dark, sometimes violent and seemingly hopeless city, accepting the status quo in preference to the challenges and risks of looking and moving beyond.

Don’t read this book as a Bible study of what happens after death. Instead, we’re told this “afterworld” has been “created” by humanity itself as a conglomeration of the many and varied beliefs humans have held in the many and varied cultures and religions through history. And like many mythologies of journeys into the world of the dead, the hero’s task is primarily about learning to live well in the world we all know.

Author Lynnette Lounsbury lectures in communication, film and history at Avondale College of Higher Education. She draws on her life experience and academic studies to imagine and populate this shadow world and the maze that looms as the ultimate test of Dominic’s character and relationships. Afterworld sustains the mythology, metaphor and meaning over its 400 pages as an imaginative, intelligent and engaging story.

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Author on ancients and afterworlds
The Australian book industry’s Publisher of the Year is now a contributing cause to what an Avondale lecturer describes as her “incurable disease.”