You know a book is good if your wife keeps asking what you’re laughing at. The answer was this book. It is funny, it is really funny. And the ending will leave a tear in your eye.
“What’s so funny there?”
she whispers through the lamplight
as he grins and reads
You’ll understand the haiku if you read the book.
A review of DEATH AND THE DEVIL.
DEATH AND THE DARWINIAN
It is a well-established fact across most of the known multiverse that death is, generally speaking, the end of life. This is the sort of obvious statement that most beings understand intuitively, in the same way they understand that water is wet or that the likelihood of autocorrect humiliating you increases exponentially with the importance of the message being sent.
What is rather less well-established is what happens immediately after death, in that awkward period between the cessation of biological functions and whatever comes next. This is primarily because most beings who experience death are, by definition, no longer in a position to write detailed reports about it, and those who claim to have had “near-death experiences” typically experience something more akin to “near-near-death” or “death-adjacent” moments, which is rather like claiming to be an expert on the history of Paris because your plane once flew over the south of France.
Dr. Mortimer Finch, professor of evolutionary biology at the prestigious University of West Anglia, had spent his entire fifty-seven-year academic career insisting that death was merely the natural conclusion of a biological process, a physical event no more spiritually significant than the shedding of a snake skin or the molting of an upwardly mobile crab. The universe, Dr. Finch maintained, was a magnificent accident—an unplanned, undirected series of chemical and physical processes that, through billions of years of trial and error, had produced everything from slime molds to symphony orchestras.
This conviction had served him well throughout his distinguished career, earning him numerous academic accolades, a comfortable tenure, and the quiet disdain of the university’s theology department, whose offices were, perhaps not coincidentally, located in the building on the opposite side of the campus.
It was therefore somewhat disconcerting for Dr. Finch to one day find himself face-to-face with Death.
