Book Review: My Life with Corpses

Reviewed By: Harriet Klausner

My Life with Corpses     Amazon US HC Amazon Canada HC
Wylene Dunbar
Class/Genre:   Fiction   Fantasy   Supernatural
Harcourt, Jun 2004, $24.00, 318 pp.

Oz claims to have been born to a woman who died a decade earlier. Her sister died as a young child. Her father, who was probably more dead than alive, raised Oz until she was ten years old; that is when he chose death. Her neighbor Winfield Evan Stark took her away from the dead until he joined the other side.

Oz has become a philosophy professor in Mississippi where she feels the living students act more dead than the deceased, that she hangs around with all the time. Animals are livelier than the living. Still she espouses her beliefs to an audience of the dead living.

However, Oz has a bigger concern. As she relates her life amidst moving corpses, the body of Winfield is no longer in his gravesite and though the Kansas officials and the gravediggers wonder who desecrated this grave, Oz knows he is out there trying to send her a message. She must find him to learn what he needs to tell her.

MY LIFE WITH CORPSES is a metaphysical fantasy that works because readers will believe that Oz is seeing the dead moving about. The story line uses symbolism that often is too obviously in the reader’s face (Oz from Kansas) and lacks action. Yet fans will not mind as the starkness of reality hits home in such a way that Wylene Dunbar’s account feels more like a biography than a fantasy even with the dead seemingly more alive than many of the living.

Harriet Klausner

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Harriet Klausner