In Colma’s many graveyards, most of the dead are grateful that young Michael Mercer has joined the police force and is patrolling the famous “cemetery city” outside San Francisco. But for Alive in Necropolis, author Doug Dorst, ’91, has imagined a few Colma ghosts who do not go gentle into their good nights.
Notorious Doc Barker, his fatal wound oozing anew each evening, leads such a ghost gang. These ruffians are all too happy to prey on the respectable undead, including such historical luminaries as aviator Lincoln Beachey, accidental lobotomy survivor Phineas Gage and pyrophiliac philanthropist Lillie Hitchcock Coit.
What is perhaps most satisfying about this droll debut novel is that the ghost celebrities don’t overshadow the living nonentities. Mercer, his cocksure mentor on the police force, the older nurse he’s halfheartedly wooing, the reporter he lusts after, his high school buddies, a teenager he rescues from a hazing, the pastor he suspects of grift, the policeman’s widow who lives next door—these aren’t the typical persons of interest in contemporary fiction. But in Alive in Necropolis (Riverhead Books, $25.95), each is an unforgettable character whose motivations are understandable even when he or she is most messed up. And in a book where nearly everyone works the night shift and unwinds with a drink or three, mess is inevitable.
In particular, readers will fall in love with the good-hearted Mercer, who thrives on the job’s excitement yet spends most of the book with head trauma sustained on duty. Ambivalent about what it means to be an adult, Mercer struggles with how to settle into his 30s in the same way his constituents struggle to settle into their graves.
