A manic exploration of death and the absurdity of life. Jerry is stuck on the toilet at 9 a.m., procrastinating on a low-rent freelance gig about the late Senator Lindsey Graham, when he finds himself face-to-face with an impossible visitor: his mother, who’s dead, and has been for quite some time. She claims his father is missing in the Afterlife—and needs her only son to help find him. In Deadville, Jerry finds himself in a chaotic bureaucratic afterlife packed with dead celebrities—from Benjamin Franklin to Amy Winehouse—all with unresolved grudges. He careens through misadventures with Lou Reed (and Lou’s sock puppet named Sugar), as his mother bullies, shames, and emotionally steamrolls him at every turn. But his father isn’t really missing, he’s thriving—reinvented as a delusional Reichsführer running a Nazi-infested pool hall. The manic ride through the Afterlife leaves Jerry pulverized, love-struck, and addicted to death. Part metaphysical satire, part post-life fever dream, Bad Sex in the Afterlife reads like a deranged cousin of Lincoln in the Bardo—if Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs co-wrote a cursed family memoir at gunpoint.
