Drew Magary‘s debut novel, The Postmortal, has a spiky, attention-grabbing cover image of the Grim Reaper impaled on his own death-delivery scythe. It’s the perfect visualization of the book’s unnerving premise that, in the very near future, aging has been eradicated and humans can lock their bodies in a prime-specimen state.
Illustrated by Kristian Hammerstad and designed by Gregg Kulick, the cover has a grim sense of humor, but The Postmortal (Penguin Book, $15) mostly skips the humor, opting instead for a disturbing portrait of a society convinced it’s close to utopia when a cure for aging is invented. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for that seeming utopia to dissolve into a planet – overstressed from overpopulation, food and fuel shortages, and general lawlessness – going into systemic failure.
Magary, a writer for Deadspin and Maxim, among other media outlets, frames the book as if it’s a diary discovered 75 years after the invention of the immortality drug. The author has imagined such an absorbing picture of dawning apocalypse that the first-person, super-insular (and, by design, not particularly literary) perspective is frustrating – the book feels like it’s straining to be much bigger than the device will allow. Still, The Postmortal is a suitably chilling entry into the “it’s-the-end-of-the-world” canon.
Magary will be at the Black Sheep Lodge (2108 S. Lamar Blvd.) tomorrow evening (Thursday, Sept. 29) from 5-8pm. Books will be on hand for the purchasing, Magary will be around for the signing of said books, and strong drink will be flowing for when you start thinking too long on how alarmingly plausible Magary’s fictional machinations seem and jeez the world is really going down the shitter, huh?
This article appears in September 23 • 2011.
