It is a gloriously rare thing indeed when a book comes along such as The Dead Romantics by Ashley Poston which takes a well-worn premise and absolutely and completely upends it in ways both sweetly heartfelt and profoundly moving.
When this happens it affirms once again that while there may not be anything new under the sun, there can still be some breathtakingly wonderful takes on these tropes and cliches, reinterpretations that spin on the talent and perception of writers, such as Poston, with a thoroughly unique take on the world.
That’s what you want from any book really but it’s not always what you get, but in The Dead Romantics it’s there with bells on as Poston serves up her own funny, touching and imaginatively affecting look at what might happen if you are the sort of person who can see and talk to ghosts and who, in the midst of being called home to your hometown to help bury your father, finds out that your new editor, a handsome hunk of a man who’s just denied you an extension on the book you’re ghostwriting, is also very, very dead.
As in ghost at the front door of your loving but decidedly quirky family’s funeral parlor (with amusing touches of The Addams Family) who just as confused about why he’s there as you are to see him.
“It was the universe telling me that I couldn’t forget. That if love was true, then love was a lie. That I had been happy once, happy then, but not happy forever. Because that wasn’t my story. That even my stories weren’t mine.
Perhaps they never were.” (P. 43)
If you think that’s a LOT to take in one day or so, you’d be right and Florence Day, who’s already damagingly adrift at sea, existentially wise at least, unable to finish the novel she is ghostwriting for one of America’s most popular and beloved romance writers because she believes love is DEAD – a bad break-up a year earlier has left her with her romantic heart permanently flatlining – is almost at the point of breaking when the editor Benji Andor turns up on possibly the worst day of her life.
To say she’s thrown is to graphically understate things, so overwhelmed to be back in the hometown she fled ten years earlier that is now bereft of her funny, massively quirky father – he’s the type of man who has an Elvis impersonator sing at his funeral and orders very unusual balloons to decorate it – that she can’t comprehend how it is that Ben, as he’s known, is there at all.
And all when she’s trying to finalise arrangements for the funeral based on her father’s idiosyncratically glorious instructions, reconnect with old school friends, such as they are (not good, let’s be honest) and re-establish some emotional intimacy with her family, especially younger sister Alice; yup, not much going on at all, really …
It is, of course, way more than anyone can handle, a situation that gets infinitely more complex and messy when it becomes apparent that Florence, who most definitely does not believe in love anymore after that scoundrel Lee stole one of the most precious non-material things she could be, might just be falling for Ben, a GHOST, and he might be falling for her.
It’s a heaping, helping case of terrible timing all around, really.
It’s at this point that you could be forgiven for thinking that we’ve been there, done that and got the warm and fuzzy rom-com Ghostbusters meets The Ghost Whisperer vibes to prove it.
But as already touched upon, The Dead Romantics is not your average hackneyed take on the good old girl-can-talk-to-ghosts-and-falls-for-him-at-the-worst-possible-time tale because Poston, while she manages to set up a gorgeous romantic comedy that tugs at all the heartstrings just so, is not about to serve some tired romantic has-been ideas or emotions to readers.
In a fun and inventive novel that is full to the supernatural brim with witty remarks and meet-cute exchanges, we also get a truly affecting deep dive into how grief and loss affects a person and not in the a movie-esque way where every line is perfect and every moment a self-realisational joy.
Not only is Florence, who’s never really recovered from what drove her from her hometown in the first place to the bright lights, big city of New York City where she simultaneously became a writer but also didn’t (at least not in the way she intended), grieving the loss of a father with whom she was very close but she’s grappling with the fact that life won’t ever be the same again.
It taps into that disorienting sense that anyone who’s lost someone massively important to them will instantly recognise where all your old fear, insecurities and anxieties about life come back to roost and won’t be silenced with the usual coping mechanisms.
“Not all my companions would be ghosts, but it was okay if some of them were.
Because Dad was right, in the end, about love. It was loyal, and stubborn, and hopeful. It was a brother calling before a funeral to ask how the latest book was going. It was a sister scolding her older sister for running away. It was a little girl on a stormy night tucked into the lap of an undertaker, listening to the sound of the wind through the creaky Victorian house. It was a ballroom dancer spinning around in an empty parlor with the ghost of her husband and a song in her throat. It was petting good dogs, and quiet mornings waking up beside a man with impossibly dark eyes and a voice with the syrupy sweetness of third-shelf vodka. It was a best friend flying in from New York on a moment’s notice.
It was life, wild and finite.
It was a few simple words, written in loopy longhand.
“‘Love is a celebration,’ I read, my voice wobbling, “‘of life and death. It stays with you. It lingers, long after I’m gone. Listen for me when the wind rushes through the trees. I love you.'”
I folded the letter back up and whispered softly, privately, one final time, ‘Goodbye, Dad.'” (P. 286)
To be fair, Florence hasn’t been coping for a decade, a fractured state of being that’s only been made by her break up with Lee, her love-is-dead writer’s block, and her sense that she has failed manifestly at life, and which has received a near fatal blow with her father’s passing and Ben’s unsettling appearance in non-corporeal form.
All of this slowly creeping and instantly destructive loss in captured in all its emotional intensity by Poston who manages to blend it near seamlessly in a novel that is for all the world, on paper at least, a screwball supernatural rom-com but which spends a great deal of its time not laughing.
That might sound like a weird mix but its not, not in the slightest; The Dead Romantics is an adept and funny, romantic sigh-worthy delight of a book that also manages to pack a sizable emotional punch, the kind that taps into that primal part of you that fears that all you will ever know, now your loved one has died, are terrible, soul-searingly, gut-wrenchingly awful things.
The Dead Romantics is honest about that but also savvy enough to know that in-between the tears and end of all things, lie laughter and memory and the start of altogether new things, some very serious life moments that sit very happily next to the book’s warmer, sappier, more deliciously light and fluffy joys.
This is a novel that has it all – a superlative rom-com that takes a well-worn idea and runs with it, being both gorgeously, happily funny and romantic and also a knowing, empathetic excursion into the grief, and how that even in that impossible limbo between life as you knew it dying and the next part of your life coming into its own, through all kinds of pain and sadness, there can be some effervescent lightness and fun, and LOVE, the kind that warms a heart that thought it was long past that kind of heady re-invention and which actually restores life in such a way that it is possible to smile and love again.