The Very Special Dead

Another fine book from Meat For Tea Press.

A powerful blend of fable and realism, The Very Special Dead examines lost love and the ruins of the American Dream. Three men in a haunted New England fishing village are so demoralized with debt, terminal illness and bereavement that they swap bodies with three revenants they meet one night on a marshy road. The men are left in the bodies of the dead, watching their families and lives helplessly from outside and trying desperately to get back. The women get left behind and have to clean up the mess their men have left in their wake. Beautiful, heartbreaking, and stunningly imaginative, Livermore grapples with what it is to love, to lose, and, ultimately, to live.

"Lyrical, poignant and perfectly grounded in the day-to-day lives of a beautifully evoked New England fishing town, The Very Special Dead deftly weaves together a compelling drama of social decay and personal loss and an uncanny excursion into the twilight zone that sits between the world we know and that undiscovered country from which, so they say, no traveller returns." - John Burnside, Booker Prize judge and T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize-winning author of Glister

"A sad, terrifying and wonderfully weird book. Livermore's take on the medieval story of the Three Living and the Three Dead and what they might teach each other is a powerful update of the tale for the zombie age. Usually I have no use for zombies, but Livermore's version of the revenant - which is, after all, quite a different thing, involving no plague, spells or necromancers - is a powerful indictment of an America in which the poor live in medieval conditions, utterly without help and crushed by a casual and all-encompassing class war. For the three men in this very atmospheric book, death is actually preferable to the life they lead in their gutted New England fishing town, and once they leave it (life, that is), in a striking re-do of the old theological idea of death-in-life, they are free to make some decisions about it for the very first time. A book that should win awards." - Sarah Tolmie, author of All the Horses of Iceland and The Fourth Island

"The eponymous revenants of The Very Special Dead, Christian Livermore's powerful and precisely observed novel, are more than terrifying supernatural entities. They are a timely indictment of an American Dream turned Nightmare which has condemned far, far too many good, hardworking people to terrifying half-lives of economic desperation. The Very Special Dead works at every level. It will do more than keep you turning pages deep into the night; it will wake you up to the everyday horrors all around us." - Dale Bailey, author of In the Night Wood