Dead Rules (review)

Jana knows that she and Michael are meant to be together, their romantic and theatrical lives entwined for all time, so when she dies in a freak bowling accident, she’s not quite sure how to go on with the afterlife without him. Said afterlife is, for teens, a quirky boarding school known as Dead School where students are grouped in a hierarchy of Virgins (self-explanatory), Risers (basically good kids on a track to rise to heaven), and Sliders (kids who died doing something bad and have been given only a perfunctory chance to avoid a mostly inevitable downslide into the hot place) in order to complete their maturation process before moving on to their final destination. The intermixing of groups is strictly verboten, but Jana, a Riser, strikes up a friendship with a dreamy Slider named Mars, hoping he can help her communicate with Michael. Russell plays fluidly and hilariously with the underlying craziness of idolizing Romeo and Juliet as a romantic ideal: Jana is an obsessive girlfriend even in life, and in death she is downright psycho as she contemplates in disturbing detail how best to kill Michael (nail gun? Poison? Ice pick?) so that they can be reunited. Unfortunately, the morality is inclined to be arbitrary, and the forces that drive Jana’s character to such extremes are left undeveloped: her mother’s addiction, neglect, and image-obsession are referenced but never explored, while her history with Michael is barely sketched. Still, the world of Dead School is a well-developed, engagingly odd place that will appeal to fans of Zevin’s Elsewhere (BCCB 9/05) and the show Dead Like Me; the mystery of Jana’s true cause of death sustains the tension, and the wealth of dryly macabre details gives this debut novel plenty of personality.