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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
How To Be Dead by Dave Turner is a short and snappy humorous urban fantasy novella.
To start with, I’d like to say that I found this novella genuinely funny. Perhaps not quite laugh out loud, but I found myself internally chuckling a fair bit. The world building feels not too dissimilar from a Tom Holt book – pairing the supernatural with the mundane in an ironic fashion.
There are two protagonists: Dave, a prototypical down on his luck office schlub who just so happens to be able to see dead people; and Death, the Pratchettian personification of the grim reaper. It’s hard for me to fairly judge the character of Death, considering how impactful the Discworld novels were on my adolescence, and how iconic that version of Death is to me. I at least think Turner did an alright job of putting his own spin on the character, although I found the Death sections a little weaker.
Dave is dealing with a dead end job at a faceless and likely evil corporation, a near Death experience, and a badly timed attempt to date a co-worker. There’s not much else I can say about the plot without spoiling it – not that there’s much to spoil. There’s some mildly clever time shenanigans, and a moderately threatening ghost, but not all that much else. But it’s a short book, and the majority of the gags landed for me.
These kind of books live and die on the reader connecting with the humour within. For me, it stuck the landing, and if you’re looking for a quick humorous fantasy book with a urban fantasy setting, I’d recommend giving it a try.
Rating: 7.5/10
For reviews like this and more, visit my blog
To start with, I’d like to say that I found this novella genuinely funny. Perhaps not quite laugh out loud, but I found myself internally chuckling a fair bit. The world building feels not too dissimilar from a Tom Holt book – pairing the supernatural with the mundane in an ironic fashion.
There are two protagonists: Dave, a prototypical down on his luck office schlub who just so happens to be able to see dead people; and Death, the Pratchettian personification of the grim reaper. It’s hard for me to fairly judge the character of Death, considering how impactful the Discworld novels were on my adolescence, and how iconic that version of Death is to me. I at least think Turner did an alright job of putting his own spin on the character, although I found the Death sections a little weaker.
Dave is dealing with a dead end job at a faceless and likely evil corporation, a near Death experience, and a badly timed attempt to date a co-worker. There’s not much else I can say about the plot without spoiling it – not that there’s much to spoil. There’s some mildly clever time shenanigans, and a moderately threatening ghost, but not all that much else. But it’s a short book, and the majority of the gags landed for me.
These kind of books live and die on the reader connecting with the humour within. For me, it stuck the landing, and if you’re looking for a quick humorous fantasy book with a urban fantasy setting, I’d recommend giving it a try.
Rating: 7.5/10
For reviews like this and more, visit my blog
Laughs for sure
This book is funny! Really cheered me up on a very bad day, can't wait to read the next one.
This book is funny! Really cheered me up on a very bad day, can't wait to read the next one.
I originally stumbled across Dave Turner via his parody Twitter account from which he tweeted as a sarcastic and put-upon version of everyone's favourite anthropomorphic personification, Death. Later Turner started to publish an online weekly comic fantasy serial in which ghosts and other undead phenomena are administrative errors which have occurred because Death got behind on the paperwork. This book is the first of three published novellas based on that online weekly serial.
The sense of humour in the writing is just what I'd expected from his Twitter exploits - equal parts dry and tongue-in cheek, observational in a way that resonates with me personally, and with just enough pop-culture references to be amusing and not intrusive.
Being a novella it was reasonably short, but nonetheless I tore through it really quickly as the plot was intriguing and the writing style very easy to digest. In fact my only real complaint is that it was so short!
I was lucky enough to bag the Kindle version for free during a promotion a few months ago, but I would have been happy to pay for it at any other time and will definitely cough up for the sequels when they arrive.
The sense of humour in the writing is just what I'd expected from his Twitter exploits - equal parts dry and tongue-in cheek, observational in a way that resonates with me personally, and with just enough pop-culture references to be amusing and not intrusive.
Being a novella it was reasonably short, but nonetheless I tore through it really quickly as the plot was intriguing and the writing style very easy to digest. In fact my only real complaint is that it was so short!
I was lucky enough to bag the Kindle version for free during a promotion a few months ago, but I would have been happy to pay for it at any other time and will definitely cough up for the sequels when they arrive.
An excellent novel that you'd never hear of if you weren't reading this. Get it, and Paper Cuts, the sequel.