cover image Cloud 8

Cloud 8

Grant Bailie. Ig Publishing, $14.95 (260pp) ISBN 978-0-9703125-2-5

The afterlife isn't all it's cracked up to be, according to James, the narrator of Grant Bailie's cleanly written but underplotted novel Cloud 8. Many of the dead take on the guise of Abraham Lincoln, and scenes from life on Earth are broadcast on television, but nothing else about James's existence (or nonexistence) is remarkable. Assigned to a dusty apartment, saddled with an uncommunicative roommate and given a job proofreading a software manual, he soon stops trying to ask questions or investigate. His encounters with the other dead are cryptic and fleeting. The idea that heaven (or maybe purgatory) is a bureaucratic wasteland is oddly pleasing, if familiar, but Bailie never develops his promising conceit into a full-fledged story, leaving his readers mired in the same boredom as his aimless narrator.