Welcome to Everlost

Allie and Nick are 14-year-old passengers in two cars that hit head-on.  They find themselves flying through a tunnel toward a bright light. Their "bodies" collide, and they wake up in a forest.  Welcome, kids, to the world of Everlost.

When I blundered onto the Hunger Games trilogy last winter, my interest was re-awakened (moderately) in the young adult fantasy genre.  As an indirect result, this past week I finished reading the Everlost trilogy -- Everlost, Everwild, and Everfound, known more formally as the Skinjacker trilogy -- by author Neal Shusterman.

Everlost is a shadow world that overlies our own.  It's occupied only by children and teenagers, kids who for one reason or another didn't "get where they were going."  Adults apparently have better defined personas, and always "get where they're going" -- i.e., when they die, they always arrive at that bright light, whatever that bright light may portend for them.

Everlost has complex rules, as we learn together with Allie and Nick as the story progresses.  "Afterlights," as Everlost's inhabitants are known, can see what the living are doing, in a somewhat shadowy way, but the living can't see them.  Afterlights can feel objects -- like freeway traffic -- as those objects pass through them.  The sensation is a bit uncomfortable, but doesn't hurt.  Afterlights are beyond being hurt.

Allie is part of a small minority of Afterlights who can interact physically with the living world by entering the body of living humans or animals.  She "skinjacks" them. (Old fashioned folks would say she "possesses" them.) She can do so because, unlike Nick, she wasn't actually killed in the accident.  "Skinjackers" have bodies that either lie in a deep coma or are kept alive in hospitals in a vegetative state. They exist in both worlds. Until Allie's body dies, she can skinjack.

Afterlights have to keep moving, or find "dead spots" on which to stand, or gravity gradually sucks them into the earth. Once beneath the surface, they fall deeper and deeper, ultimately to the molten core where they'll remain as long as the earth remains intact.  This sounds horrible, but the Afterlights in the core, like the great majority on the surface of Everlost, find increasing delight in finding one simple but interesting activity and repeating it day after day.  One Afterlight in the core taught many of his neighbors to begin singing "One Trillion Bottles of Beer on the Wall," a song calculated to keep them amused for some years.  (This is juvenile fiction, don't forget!)

Although the great majority of Afterlights grow increasingly passive as time passes in Everlost, some preserve the ambitions and passions of their earthly lives, and by force of personality contribute to great dramas that sweep Everlost.  Allie and Nick both have their critical parts to play in these dramas -- dramas that, because of the ability of skinjackers to interact with the living world, have potentially huge consequences for the lives of both the living and the dead.

Of course, most of those who die never see Everlost.  They fly down the tunnel to the light the instant their life on earth ends.  Almost all Afterlights feel somewhat stranded in Everlost, and look forward to reaching the light. But Afterlights have no better idea than we do what they'll find, once they're there.  Afterlights wonder if the light is really Heaven of some sort, as they hope.  What if the light they remember seeing at the end of the tunnel is a world of eternal hellish fire?  What if both living and dead are ruled over by malignant deities?   Is there a deity?  Or are both Earth and Everlost parts of the fabric of an uncaring universe, a universe governed impersonally by implacable natural laws?

Shusterman tells us a lot about life and about Everlost.  But even the author doesn't know what awaits us all at the end of the tunnel. Afterlights sooner or later "get to where they are going," but no one knows exactly what that means.  Shusterman's only hint is the observation that each Afterlight, just before entering the tunnel on his way to the light, suddenly remembers everything about his earthly life that he's forgotten, and that he's observed by others to have a look of peace and delight on his face.  An instant later, before reaching the light, he vanishes from sight in Everlost.

These are highly imaginative books.  They touch on serious philosophical issues.  They describe the passive world of most Afterlights -- memories of whose pasts are failing, each absorbed in his or her own thoughts and repetitive activities -- in a way that calls to mind a vast nursing home.  But a nursing home where the falling away of ambition and curiosity brings a strange peace and happiness, and may in fact be part of the preparation for an early voyage to the light.

The books are imaginative and philosophical and moving, but they are also full of adventure, of monstrous beings, of reflections on our own society, and of at times rather funny dialogue.  In the third book, especially, Shusterman's writing sometimes calls to mind the ironic and outrageous humor of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

What can I say?  It's "kid's lit," but I loved it.  Sometimes, youth really is wasted on the young.  You don't have to be a teenager to enjoy the Everlost trilogy.