Under the Whispering Door
There's something quietly extraordinary about a novel that can make you grieve a character's wasted life while simultaneously warming you from the inside out. That's precisely what TJ Klune achieves here. Wallace is, to put it plainly, not a particularly likeable man. He spent his years chained to his desk, snapping at colleagues and missing every moment that might have actually counted. His funeral is, tellingly, rather poorly attended. Then a reaper turns up, and things get complicated. It turns out Wallace is dead, and no amount of outrage is going to change that. Enter Hugo, proprietor of a charmingly peculiar tea shop called Charon's Crossing, where the scones are always fresh and the clientele occasionally transparent. Hugo offers to help Wallace move on to whatever lies beyond the door. Wallace, being Wallace, resists. What follows is a story about a man given seven days to learn how to be human, sharing jokes with a resident ghost, discovering the strange joy of embarrassing footwear, and finally noticing the stars. It's also, quietly, a love story. Tender and funny in equal measure, the book rewards patient readers with a finale that genuinely earns its emotional weight. Fans of Fredrik Backman's A Man Called Ove or the television series The Good Place will find much to cherish here. Praise from V.E. Schwab, Charlaine Harris, and Gail Carriger only confirms what the pages make obvious: Klune writes with rare warmth and wit.
- Author: Travis Klune
- Publisher: Tor
- Genre: Horror
- ISBN: 978-1529092271
- Pages: 384 pages