Hereafter Lies: R.I.P.
Hereafter Lies Book 1
by Elijah B. Wilder

Like any Omega agent, Deja Vale’s directive is to contain those ghosts hell-bent on ensouling the unborn to rejoin the living. He’s also an Odd. Unlike his teammates, Deja can enter the living world—unmasked—and see past the fog cloaking it from nonliving eyes. Apart from prompting puns and pop culture deep cuts that nobody on his team appreciates properly, his Oddity takes its toll.

But Omega South’s already fallen and Omega North might be next. Agents are spread thin and Odds even thinner. Though Deja’s barely recovered from the mission that lost him half his team and half his memories, he’s sent back to the field—haunted by the fear his history of hallucinations makes him a liability to the few teammates he has left. Which is fine! He’s fine. No hallucinations around here! Gordon Ramsay gives ultra-specific ghost-fighting and risotto-seasoning advice to all the nonliving girls through the TV, this is all just fine.

Deja’s team is dispatched by ever-shifting train to police a cross-section of American Gothic: Possessed parrots, Victorian murder-children, crazed Canadian clowns, and man-eating forests. Between it all, they discover a pattern. Someone is teaching these ghosts to fight back. But when Deja’s hallucinated warnings save his team more than once, he realizes those messages might be real, and his “hallucinations” a sign of memories waiting to be recovered. Only, the price of getting those memories back—and the truth of how his first teammates were lost—might just be the destruction of Omega North itself.

Someone is counting on it.

5 out of 5 fairies

This was a fun, engaging read. Vale offers comedic relief amongst some seriously tense moments, all while trying to hang onto his sanity. Wilder has done an amazing job of bringing the other world to life, so to speak, and changing how our world is perceived, when it’s seen through the eyes of the unliving. There’s a sense of urgency, not only to the team stopping ghosts, but Deja recovering his memories. Those memories are the thread running through everything, and pulling you forward as bits of the otherworld and the bureaucracy that inhabits it, functions, is revealed. I love how everything is revealed slowly, and although I don’t know anything about this unique place and organization, I don’t feel lost either. There are no information dumps, so nothing gets overwhelming. Cannot recommend for occult fantasy lovers (who aren’t afraid of evil ghost clowns).

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Goodreads

ELIJAH B. WILDER writes things—mostly blurbs like this. Otherwise, he’s wandering around cemeteries at the crack of dawn in search of mushrooms and answering awkward questions from concerned locals. Then he’s asking the caffeine-deprived officer ‘what he looks so grave for,’ and digging himself deeper until he awkwardly blurts out, “I’m conducting an ecological survey of residual arsenic from 19th-century burial sites!” which, while not wholly untrue, is also a lie, and this not wholly-untrue lie lands him in a city planning meeting in a capacity he is in no way qualified for: professionally or spiritually. As you may have gathered, he’s got a great deal of all-too-specific knowledge on Victorian death practices and mycology, and makes it everybody else’s problem. His parents would like him to let you know he has a Ph.D. in philosophy, but the truth is he spends very little time philosophizing, and way more time begging his dog to please, please just come inside, and trying to remember what the hell he came downstairs for anyway.

If you know what the hell he came downstairs for, please contact him on his website. Or here. Or Ouija board. Or particularly industrious/well-trained pigeon. 

Website | Instagram