In the provocative, off-kilter image of the afterlife offered in Cloud 8, most differences from “real” life are banal and fairly useless — the narrator can walk for as long as he wants without getting tired, and lots of people look like Abraham Lincoln. Beyond that, it’s all pretty familiar: lousy apartments, dull jobs, and painful loneliness in an unnamed crumbling city (not necessarily Cleveland, but close to the way I imagine that town — the author’s home — in some regards). It’s a vision so far from more familiar rosy idealizations of Heaven that the supposedly reassuring notion of a “better life to come” is hollowed out, and we’re forced to wonder as readers why we put up with such misery as workers and spouses and human beings while we’re alive, if not to be rewarded for our endurance when we pass on. This isn’t a didactic or heavy-handed novel by any means, but that still comes across as a pretty ferocious critique in its own quiet way. As the narrator says at one point, “I guess I expected more from death.” Instead, he gets an afterlife with all the tedium of actual living, but without any of the choices — even the illusory ones — that make our lives feel like our own. Stylistically, Bailie’s spare, straightforward style (which I really admire) suits his story well because it avoids making melodrama of what easily could go in that direction; Cloud 8 reminded me of Jim Krusoe’s fiction that way, not to mention that Krusoe’s novel Erased employs its own imaginary version of Cleveland as a city of the afterlife.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll also mention that I’m not quite an impartial reviewer. I’ve never met Grant Bailie in person, but I did edit and publish his serial novel New Hope For Small Men.