The Dead I Know by Scot Gardner Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“There was the unknown, the dark, the cold and the emptiness to contend with out there, but those concepts are all relative. Cold compared to what? A dead hand? Dark compared to what? Unblinking eyes? At times the ocean seemed full beside my emptiness. At times it was the one knowable thing in my world.”- The Dead I Know, Scot Gardner

Aaron Rowe walks in his sleep and haunted by dreams he can’t explain and memories he can’t recover. Death doesn’t scare him—his new job with a funeral director may even be his salvation. But if he doesn’t discover the truth about his hidden past soon, he may fall asleep one night and never wake up. In this dark and witty psychological drama about survival, Aaron finds that making peace with the dead may be easier than coming to terms with the living.

This is a reread for me, and I wasn't going to write a whole review for it until I read another book about funeral homes that I was looking forward to read and was struck by an idea. One of my favorite things to read about are funeral homes and the whole death business. So, I decided that it would be fun to do a mini series of reviews on my blog in which I reviewed several books on funeral homes. I will be focusing on fiction, and probably mostly YA but I might include one or two adult novels- one of those books may or may not be The Loved One. So, here is my first entry- The Dead I Know by Scot Gardner.

The Dead I Know is one of the darker entries in the YA funeral home lit list with a very horror movie-esque plot despite the fact that the book is not a horror novel. Our main character, Aaron Rowe, is a sleepwalker, dealing with his Mam's growing dementia and also the nightmares that have been plaguing him since he was a young boy. So naturally, he takes a job- more like paid apprenticeship- at a funeral home. Sound logic, that.

When I was thinking of a word to describe the writing, quiet came to mind. This is almost ironic, given how much happens in such a short book, but Gardner does not rely on dialogue or other ways of explicitly stating things that have happened to move the plot along. Instead, it's very action-based with a lot of things shown to us. Surprising, because there are at least 3 separate plot lines going on in this short little novel. There's the funeral home, then there's the sleepwalking, then there's the dementia, and then there's the money stealing thing which probably was the least useful of all of them and had an unsatisfactory conclusion. 

The best thing about this book is Aaron Rowe. Though maybe I'm just saying that because I developed something of a crush on him. He's just really endearing, with the way he acts around Mam or Skye or John Barton. He's one of those characters with a lot of personality just through the way he speaks and acts. 

This is one of my favorite books in retrospect from 2016, and in hindsight perhaps some of the later entries on my list probably should have been substituted for this one and Burial Rites. Because this book isn't for everyone. The humor is dark, the funeral home parts are detailed and even on the explicit side for some people, and there's a lot going on for such a quiet book. But this is one of those few novels that just work for me. Almost everything about it works really well, and it's a staple novel for anyone who wants to get into the Death Business YA microtrend. 

8.5 out of 10 (reread)