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Under the Whispering Door - TJ Klune
I really didn't like House in the Cerulean Sea, and that has made me very reluctant to read any more of Klune's books, but I'm glad I gave this one a chance - I really liked it! It's got a number of things in common with the other one, but I feel like a number of the similar elements that didn't work for me in Cerulean Sea did actually work here, and the ones that didn't, I was willing to overlook because I enjoyed the rest of it, though I'll still mention them under the cut.
I actually picked up this book because I was buying his werewolf book, which I also plan to read, but I saw this right next to it and was reminded that I found the premise interesting (dealing with the afterlife and Grim Reapers, basically) so I got it too and read it first. There were a few points where I just went "Oh, Klune, STOP" - there are definitely elements of overwhelming tweeness to this book as well - but on the whole I really enjoyed it and blazed through most of it yesterday.
Wallace Price is a terrible person, a cutthroat lawyer and the kind of awful boss who fires an employee for being a couple of hours late with her paperwork. Everyone from his partners at the firm to his ex-wife hates him. Then he has a heart attack at forty, and finds himself at his own funeral where a perky woman named Mei shows up and tells him that she is a Reaper, he's dead, and he needs to process his mortal life so he can move on to the afterlife, and takes him to a twee tea shop which exists as a portal to the afterlife, where he needs to stay until he's ready to move on.
(I have to say that being trapped in a twee tea shop for the remainder of your Earthly existence sounds kind of hellish. This is definitely a tea shop of the Cozy variety, leaning heavily into descriptions of tea and scones, very light on actual tea/coffee shop business.)
The tea shop is run by Hugo, the Ferryman to the afterlife, whose job is to help the newly dead process their deaths and pass on through a door to the afterlife which is upstairs in the tea shop. Hugo was probably the weakest link of the book for me. He is Nice and Empathic and also a bit passive and twee. Wallace immediately falls head over heels for him. But it can never work out because Wallace is dead and can't touch the living and will also be moving on to the afterlife shortly; WOE!
So here's what made me actually love this book, though: the things that made Wallace a good lawyer and a terrible person when he was alive - his determination, his stubbornness, his drive to be The Best at everything he does, his desire to ask "why" about everything, even his general lawyer-liness - are not actually flaws per se, even though they set him at odds with the other residents of the cozy twee afterlife tea shop. They actually need someone who pushes and asks "why." It's just that he gradually learns to temper his innate assholishness with consideration for other people, and eventually discovers previously untapped depths of kindness and loyalty in himself.
Hugo - the Ferryman - and Mei - the Reaper - are both living people; these are jobs assumed by individuals who have been closely touched by death. The dead cannot touch the living, but Mei can pass back and forth between the living and dead worlds, allowing her to physically interact with Wallace when she wants to, which was honestly a very fun mechanic. (Otherwise Wallace is basically a ghost; he can interact with corporeal matter somewhat haphazardly, poltergeist-style, but otherwise goes right through things.)
The book also has some genuinely numinous, eerie, and even horror-adjacent elements surrounding Death as a thing. I think I might have liked the book to lean harder into those elements, but I liked what it had of them and I elaborate more on that in the next section, since it's rather spoilery, ramping up to extremely spoilery towards the end.
Part of the horror is that the newly dead genuinely can't leave the tea shop - if they do, they rapidly begin to disintegrate, lose their humanity and sense of self, and become Husks, which are essentially mindless revenants. The dead cannot interact with the living world, but Husks can interact with them. One of Wallace's first acts on arriving at the tea shop is to try to flee, where he witnesses himself begin to disintegrate and meets a Husk named Cameron, who was one of Hugo's early failures as a Ferryman and has continued to haunt the general vicinity around the tea shop. Hugo's other primary failure is Nancy, a miserable, dead-eyed living woman who periodically comes into the tea shop and sits in a corner while Hugo brings her tea and sits with her in silence, until she eventually gets up and slinks out again.
It eventually comes out that both Cameron and Nancy were the result of the actions of the previous Reaper who worked with Hugo before Mei, whose lack of empathy for the souls he took led to Cameron fleeing the shop and Nancy's deceased daughter being pushed through the afterlife doorway before her time (in separate incidents). Now Cameron haunts the area around the tea shop, and Nancy shows up periodically to haunt the tea shop as a (barely) living person, and Hugo meekly takes it as punishment for his sins.
I think the biggest issue that I had with Hugo and possibly with the book overall, besides not finding him that interesting, is that the book hammers on Hugo being good at his job because he is extremely empathic and cares about everybody - but the problem is, Hugo cares about everybody to a point that sometimes paralyzes him and prevents him from actually protecting or helping the people he's supposed to be helping. He's that limp sort of Oh No I Care Too Much wet noodle of a person who becomes everyone's doormat because they won't stand up for themselves or other people. Among other things, Hugo allows a predatory fake medium named Desdemona to run roughshod across the tea shop's patrons, even though she's *actively making things worse for everyone*, because the tea shop is supposed to be Open To All, until Wallace and the tea shop's other resident ghosts get together and drive her out.
There's a scene in which Wallace consoles Hugo that what happened to Lea (Nancy's daughter) wasn't his fault, it was entirely the fault of the previous Reaper. But the thing is, it actually kind of WAS his fault, at least partly! Hugo was young and inexperienced as a Ferryman and let the Reaper make the decisions because he assumed the Reaper knew what he was doing, but he did actually have a responsibility to the ghosts he was supposed to be helping, and he *does* have some culpability for what happened to Lea and to Cameron. Drowning in guilt over it is obviously not helping anyone, but absolving himself of all guilt isn't really justified either, especially since he's STILL DOING THAT (see also: the scene with Desdemona, who would have continued to make everyone miserable and/or actively scam them if Wallace hadn't intervened).
But that is actually what I mean by the book redeeming itself by allowing Wallace to be useful and proactive and help people around him because - as much as Wallace needs to settle down his more over-the-top asshole tendencies and become a team player - they actually need a pushy smartass who isn't afraid to challenge the way things are done. Wallace is the one who is finally able to help Nancy, where Hugo's endless cups of tea and passive sympathy haven't, by pushing her to acknowledge that her daughter is gone. There is a scene in which the one thing that snaps Nancy out of her trance of apathetic grief is when one of the other ghosts - Alan, a new arrival at the tea shop who is acting out in an attempt to force the living world to respond to him - yells at her, and Nancy is able to hear him. This immediately gets put down as a bad thing (Hugo has made it clear that Nancy is Off Limits to the ghosts), which sent me into paroxysms of frustration - but actually, Wallace saw that, and remembered that, and uses that later to get Nancy to respond to the reality of her daughter's death and start moving beyond it. He is also the one to figure out that the Husks aren't irredeemably lost after all, as everyone else believes, and can still be helped.
It's the opposite of the cozy/twee trope where the person who is an angry loner is forced to sand off all their rough edges to fit in. Wallace does become a better person, but his determination and stubbornness and refusal to take "no" for an answer are some of his best qualities all along; he just has to learn a bit of humility and empathy to temper them.
And the other main thing I liked about the book is the entity referred to as "The Manager", basically Death, personified as a giant stag with glowing antlers (and sometimes a small child), who is genuinely numinous and creepy.
I think the thing that worked for me best here is that Death really is something completely beyond human ken, a force beyond humanity that doesn't understand humans at all - which is why the actual work of dealing with the newly dead is done by humans (the Ferrypeople and Reapers). Death is an impersonal force that is concerned with the natural order of things. It is inherently unfair and unjust, and there is no way to change that. The fact that the book makes the afterlife bureaucracy explicitly bureaucratic (there is even an appendix with excerpts from the Reaper training manual, which is charming and funny and also kind of horrifying) led me to expect something a bit different in how all of this worked out - I'm not sure what, but given the rest of the book and Wallace's corporate background being generally a bad thing, possibly I was expecting explicit satire about the afterlife bureaucracy being Bad and Unfair.
But instead it's just alien. It's death. We can't understand it, and it can't understand us even when it takes on a body that can talk with us. It can't be argued with on appeals to emotion and sympathy, but it is susceptible to having its own rules used against it, and Wallace is a lawyer; that's literally what he does.
In Cerulean Sea, I ended up deeply frustrated that even after the protagonist gradually crawls out of his pit of Idiot Balls and realizes that the organization he works for is corrupt and unjust, he doesn't try to do anything about it, he just quits. But in Whispering Door, the bureaucratic opposition is literally Death, which can't be changed or fought - but this doesn't stop Wallace from pushing back against it every opportunity he gets, going from being someone who truly doesn't care about anything except Winning, to fighting to make his corner of the universe a tiny bit more just and fair even when it's Death itself that he's going up against.
In the end, Wallace out-lawyers Death, not even really on purpose, but through a combination of exploiting bureaucratic loopholes and sheer deadass courage (Wallace's solution for proving that the Husks can be saved is actually brave as fuck, which is to swap his own place in the afterlife for one of theirs), he manages to impress Death to the extent that it decides to "reward" him by giving him responsibility as the Reaper who brings in and repairs Husks - but Reapers must be living people, which gives him a second shot at living the life that he squandered the first time around.
(And the paperwork on this, the Manager implies, is going to be an absolute bitch.)
I haven't really gotten into the other characters, but there are several other permanent residents of the tea shop. I particularly liked Mei the Reaper, who comes off a bit Manic Pixie Dream Girl in her earliest appearances, but she ends up being a complete delight. Mei starts off mainly baiting Wallace's more stick-in-the-muddish tendencies and ends up genuinely becoming friends with him, and with her ability to physically switch back and forth between the human and spirit worlds puts her in the role of acting as a sort of go-between for Hugo and Wallace's death-thwarted friendship-to-romance, which I guess could be squicky in theory but is mostly just cute. ("Mei, hug Wallace for me.") Another of the permanent residents is Hugo's ghostly granddad, who teaches Wallace how to poltergeist.
There is also a ghost dog.
So yeah, I really enjoyed this one. As much as I would have liked a bit more leaning into the eerie, sad, and otherworldly elements, I felt the fact that it did have those elements provided a balance on the twee and cozy that worked for me overall. On the whole, I'm glad I gave Klune another chance, and with a 50/50 hit-and-miss track record, I'm looking forward to seeing what the werewolf book is like!
I actually picked up this book because I was buying his werewolf book, which I also plan to read, but I saw this right next to it and was reminded that I found the premise interesting (dealing with the afterlife and Grim Reapers, basically) so I got it too and read it first. There were a few points where I just went "Oh, Klune, STOP" - there are definitely elements of overwhelming tweeness to this book as well - but on the whole I really enjoyed it and blazed through most of it yesterday.
Wallace Price is a terrible person, a cutthroat lawyer and the kind of awful boss who fires an employee for being a couple of hours late with her paperwork. Everyone from his partners at the firm to his ex-wife hates him. Then he has a heart attack at forty, and finds himself at his own funeral where a perky woman named Mei shows up and tells him that she is a Reaper, he's dead, and he needs to process his mortal life so he can move on to the afterlife, and takes him to a twee tea shop which exists as a portal to the afterlife, where he needs to stay until he's ready to move on.
(I have to say that being trapped in a twee tea shop for the remainder of your Earthly existence sounds kind of hellish. This is definitely a tea shop of the Cozy variety, leaning heavily into descriptions of tea and scones, very light on actual tea/coffee shop business.)
The tea shop is run by Hugo, the Ferryman to the afterlife, whose job is to help the newly dead process their deaths and pass on through a door to the afterlife which is upstairs in the tea shop. Hugo was probably the weakest link of the book for me. He is Nice and Empathic and also a bit passive and twee. Wallace immediately falls head over heels for him. But it can never work out because Wallace is dead and can't touch the living and will also be moving on to the afterlife shortly; WOE!
So here's what made me actually love this book, though: the things that made Wallace a good lawyer and a terrible person when he was alive - his determination, his stubbornness, his drive to be The Best at everything he does, his desire to ask "why" about everything, even his general lawyer-liness - are not actually flaws per se, even though they set him at odds with the other residents of the cozy twee afterlife tea shop. They actually need someone who pushes and asks "why." It's just that he gradually learns to temper his innate assholishness with consideration for other people, and eventually discovers previously untapped depths of kindness and loyalty in himself.
Hugo - the Ferryman - and Mei - the Reaper - are both living people; these are jobs assumed by individuals who have been closely touched by death. The dead cannot touch the living, but Mei can pass back and forth between the living and dead worlds, allowing her to physically interact with Wallace when she wants to, which was honestly a very fun mechanic. (Otherwise Wallace is basically a ghost; he can interact with corporeal matter somewhat haphazardly, poltergeist-style, but otherwise goes right through things.)
The book also has some genuinely numinous, eerie, and even horror-adjacent elements surrounding Death as a thing. I think I might have liked the book to lean harder into those elements, but I liked what it had of them and I elaborate more on that in the next section, since it's rather spoilery, ramping up to extremely spoilery towards the end.
Part of the horror is that the newly dead genuinely can't leave the tea shop - if they do, they rapidly begin to disintegrate, lose their humanity and sense of self, and become Husks, which are essentially mindless revenants. The dead cannot interact with the living world, but Husks can interact with them. One of Wallace's first acts on arriving at the tea shop is to try to flee, where he witnesses himself begin to disintegrate and meets a Husk named Cameron, who was one of Hugo's early failures as a Ferryman and has continued to haunt the general vicinity around the tea shop. Hugo's other primary failure is Nancy, a miserable, dead-eyed living woman who periodically comes into the tea shop and sits in a corner while Hugo brings her tea and sits with her in silence, until she eventually gets up and slinks out again.
It eventually comes out that both Cameron and Nancy were the result of the actions of the previous Reaper who worked with Hugo before Mei, whose lack of empathy for the souls he took led to Cameron fleeing the shop and Nancy's deceased daughter being pushed through the afterlife doorway before her time (in separate incidents). Now Cameron haunts the area around the tea shop, and Nancy shows up periodically to haunt the tea shop as a (barely) living person, and Hugo meekly takes it as punishment for his sins.
I think the biggest issue that I had with Hugo and possibly with the book overall, besides not finding him that interesting, is that the book hammers on Hugo being good at his job because he is extremely empathic and cares about everybody - but the problem is, Hugo cares about everybody to a point that sometimes paralyzes him and prevents him from actually protecting or helping the people he's supposed to be helping. He's that limp sort of Oh No I Care Too Much wet noodle of a person who becomes everyone's doormat because they won't stand up for themselves or other people. Among other things, Hugo allows a predatory fake medium named Desdemona to run roughshod across the tea shop's patrons, even though she's *actively making things worse for everyone*, because the tea shop is supposed to be Open To All, until Wallace and the tea shop's other resident ghosts get together and drive her out.
There's a scene in which Wallace consoles Hugo that what happened to Lea (Nancy's daughter) wasn't his fault, it was entirely the fault of the previous Reaper. But the thing is, it actually kind of WAS his fault, at least partly! Hugo was young and inexperienced as a Ferryman and let the Reaper make the decisions because he assumed the Reaper knew what he was doing, but he did actually have a responsibility to the ghosts he was supposed to be helping, and he *does* have some culpability for what happened to Lea and to Cameron. Drowning in guilt over it is obviously not helping anyone, but absolving himself of all guilt isn't really justified either, especially since he's STILL DOING THAT (see also: the scene with Desdemona, who would have continued to make everyone miserable and/or actively scam them if Wallace hadn't intervened).
But that is actually what I mean by the book redeeming itself by allowing Wallace to be useful and proactive and help people around him because - as much as Wallace needs to settle down his more over-the-top asshole tendencies and become a team player - they actually need a pushy smartass who isn't afraid to challenge the way things are done. Wallace is the one who is finally able to help Nancy, where Hugo's endless cups of tea and passive sympathy haven't, by pushing her to acknowledge that her daughter is gone. There is a scene in which the one thing that snaps Nancy out of her trance of apathetic grief is when one of the other ghosts - Alan, a new arrival at the tea shop who is acting out in an attempt to force the living world to respond to him - yells at her, and Nancy is able to hear him. This immediately gets put down as a bad thing (Hugo has made it clear that Nancy is Off Limits to the ghosts), which sent me into paroxysms of frustration - but actually, Wallace saw that, and remembered that, and uses that later to get Nancy to respond to the reality of her daughter's death and start moving beyond it. He is also the one to figure out that the Husks aren't irredeemably lost after all, as everyone else believes, and can still be helped.
It's the opposite of the cozy/twee trope where the person who is an angry loner is forced to sand off all their rough edges to fit in. Wallace does become a better person, but his determination and stubbornness and refusal to take "no" for an answer are some of his best qualities all along; he just has to learn a bit of humility and empathy to temper them.
And the other main thing I liked about the book is the entity referred to as "The Manager", basically Death, personified as a giant stag with glowing antlers (and sometimes a small child), who is genuinely numinous and creepy.
I think the thing that worked for me best here is that Death really is something completely beyond human ken, a force beyond humanity that doesn't understand humans at all - which is why the actual work of dealing with the newly dead is done by humans (the Ferrypeople and Reapers). Death is an impersonal force that is concerned with the natural order of things. It is inherently unfair and unjust, and there is no way to change that. The fact that the book makes the afterlife bureaucracy explicitly bureaucratic (there is even an appendix with excerpts from the Reaper training manual, which is charming and funny and also kind of horrifying) led me to expect something a bit different in how all of this worked out - I'm not sure what, but given the rest of the book and Wallace's corporate background being generally a bad thing, possibly I was expecting explicit satire about the afterlife bureaucracy being Bad and Unfair.
But instead it's just alien. It's death. We can't understand it, and it can't understand us even when it takes on a body that can talk with us. It can't be argued with on appeals to emotion and sympathy, but it is susceptible to having its own rules used against it, and Wallace is a lawyer; that's literally what he does.
In Cerulean Sea, I ended up deeply frustrated that even after the protagonist gradually crawls out of his pit of Idiot Balls and realizes that the organization he works for is corrupt and unjust, he doesn't try to do anything about it, he just quits. But in Whispering Door, the bureaucratic opposition is literally Death, which can't be changed or fought - but this doesn't stop Wallace from pushing back against it every opportunity he gets, going from being someone who truly doesn't care about anything except Winning, to fighting to make his corner of the universe a tiny bit more just and fair even when it's Death itself that he's going up against.
In the end, Wallace out-lawyers Death, not even really on purpose, but through a combination of exploiting bureaucratic loopholes and sheer deadass courage (Wallace's solution for proving that the Husks can be saved is actually brave as fuck, which is to swap his own place in the afterlife for one of theirs), he manages to impress Death to the extent that it decides to "reward" him by giving him responsibility as the Reaper who brings in and repairs Husks - but Reapers must be living people, which gives him a second shot at living the life that he squandered the first time around.
(And the paperwork on this, the Manager implies, is going to be an absolute bitch.)
I haven't really gotten into the other characters, but there are several other permanent residents of the tea shop. I particularly liked Mei the Reaper, who comes off a bit Manic Pixie Dream Girl in her earliest appearances, but she ends up being a complete delight. Mei starts off mainly baiting Wallace's more stick-in-the-muddish tendencies and ends up genuinely becoming friends with him, and with her ability to physically switch back and forth between the human and spirit worlds puts her in the role of acting as a sort of go-between for Hugo and Wallace's death-thwarted friendship-to-romance, which I guess could be squicky in theory but is mostly just cute. ("Mei, hug Wallace for me.") Another of the permanent residents is Hugo's ghostly granddad, who teaches Wallace how to poltergeist.
There is also a ghost dog.
So yeah, I really enjoyed this one. As much as I would have liked a bit more leaning into the eerie, sad, and otherworldly elements, I felt the fact that it did have those elements provided a balance on the twee and cozy that worked for me overall. On the whole, I'm glad I gave Klune another chance, and with a 50/50 hit-and-miss track record, I'm looking forward to seeing what the werewolf book is like!
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Ooh, I really like the sound of this! I will put it on my to-read list.
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*I am not at all confident that this was a good example to read for this purpose.
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But your review makes me maybe pick up Whsipering Door. I just figured it was like Cerulean Sea and never picked it up...
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