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Burgess, Scott. Once to Die. Charleston, West Virginia: Quarrier Press, 2001. 287 pages. Paperback. $12.95 Raise your hand if you've ever imagined your own funeral. Now raise your hand if you've ever imagined watching it from the perspective of someone you think of as pitiful, more than a little shiftless and smelly. The question of life after death is an oft-explored concept in popular literature, music, television and movies. But typically, the cast of characters is pretty sanitized, and everyone dead is surrounded in an angelic glow of sentiment and cinema. Not so in Scott Burgess' novel, Once to Die. The protagonist, Steve Thomas, is a successful young tax manager whose life is cut abruptly short by an extremely aggressive form of lung cancer, an especially ironic fate since Steve has never smoked. Before Steve dies, he has two employees who feature prominently in his work. Tracy, the younger of the two, is a hard-working and pretty girl who Steve has a huge crush on, despite the vague presence of a boyfriend with commitment issues. The other employee is Rebecca. Rebecca is married to an alcoholic, abusive, unemployed and ignorant mess of a husband. She has two children and another on the way, none of whom can be sufficiently supported on her salary. Rebecca should and does inspire pity, but she's no prize herself. She doesn't bathe regularly, she smokes so frequently that Steve imagines he can see cigarette haze coming from her teeth, she's got greasy hair and a lumpy, depressing body. She's also the lazier, inferior worker in the office, and, in fact, the beginning of the novel shows Steve almost firing her—her job is saved only by Steve's conscience. When Steve lies on his deathbed at the hospital, both Tracy and Rebecca visit him, and Rebecca, seized with a sudden attack of guilt and gratitude, flings herself over Steve and asks God to take her instead. When Steve wakes up, we realize that Rebecca got her wish. Steve's mind is now the only element he retains of his old life— everything else is Rebecca. Not only her physical being, but her life— complete with loutish husband James, attention-starved children and a strangely silent mother-in-law. Steve is understandably shaken, and he reaches out to those he knew before. But he also takes stock of his new life and decides to change it for the better. He takes care of his/Rebecca's family and improves their living situation, even forcing derelict James to get a job. He inherits a new kind of empathy and an understanding of how tenuous a lifetime 80 can be. In short, he uses the bizarre circumstances of his rebirth as an opportunity to make some real differences in lives around him. Mr. Burgess, a native West Virginian, does an excellent job of coloring his characters with language and imagery, depicting the regional environment with flavor. He has whittled an old theme into an unusual but very relevant story about life, fate and the personal choice to change one's destiny. Balancing clever humor with hope, Once to Die is an engaging, entertaining and thoughtful read. —Deirdre H. Gage Montell, William Lynwood. Ghosts across Kentucky. Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000. 258 pages. Paperback. $17.00. Rattling chains! Lights that come on by themselves! Headless bodies mounting the backs of horses! Ghosts of people murdered! Spooky cemeteries where spirits mysteriously appear! It's all enough to scare a poor reader spitless. Folklorist and former professor at Western Kentucky University, William Lynwood Montell, with a little help from his students, newspapers, and libraries, has collected a book full of these delicious, scary, puzzling, mysterious and unexplained happenings throughout the state. In his intriguing introduction, Montell notes that Kentucky was settled by people from everywhere—from England to Ireland to Germany to parts of Africa. This rich mix of different nationalities brought with them the belief in the supernatural and the need to pass on a wide variety of tales, especially gruesome, grisly ghost tales. Many of these horror stories from the Old World display recurring themes like ghosts...

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