OL Book Review: Blueprints of the Afterlife
How do you like your post-apocalypse? A wasteland pregnant with zombies? A nuclear winter starring roving bands of leather-clad bastards? I’m tired of all those tripes too. Thankfully, I happened to pick up Ryan Boudinot’s dystopian novel, Blueprints of the Afterlife (published last month), on a whim and was treated to a fresh, complex look at a post-apoc. America. Equal parts Philip K. Dick, Terry Pratchett, and Palahniuk, Blueprints is a time-slipping, anti-corporate tale of survivors just trying to figure shit out. No epic travels across blackened Earth or raids on supply depots. Just people trying to figure out how things got so fucked up.
Boudinot’s novel jumps back and forth through time and space, following a motley crew of survivors from all walks of life. A world-champship dishwasher named Woo-jin finds a dead girl in a field. Then finds her again. Woo-jin’s sister is paid by the government to stay obese so they can grow and harvest donor tissue on her pliable flesh (she’s growing dicks on her breasts). A young film restorationist named Abby may or may not be dead – it depends on what space she’s currently occupying. Then there’s the ex-soldier left for dead, legs broken, unable to download the appropriate app to save his life. Then there’s this guy with a mysterious refrigerator who appears from nowhere. It gets more fun, more weird from there with rapid-pacing and blossoms of violence, gore, and sexy times.
I won’t detail how the world in Boudinot’s novel reached this state – that’s something the author has fun revealing as chapters go on. His imagination is seriously on fire, each page filled with more and more insane, yet totally plausible ideas. It’s not so hard to imagine that corporations like Coca Cola and Sony will someday manufacture pistols for civilian use, for example. This is the afterlife, not the kind after death, but the kind that starts when our first program begins and we’re about to be reprogrammed. Okay, I’ll shutup now. Just read the book.
