Reincarnation Blues (Poore)

Reincarnation Blues, Michael Poore (2017)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

I finished this last Friday, hours before our book club meeting. It was met with unanimous "eh". Everyone liked some parts and didn't care for others, but they didn't all line up. We found comparisons with Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, and even Stephen King in different parts of the book.

And then someone joined the chat late and rattled off every plot from every story by the above others that he was ripping off (or "paying homage to").

Milo has lived nearly 10,000 lives when he finds out that his soul is destined to oblivion if he doesn't achieve Perfection in one of the next few lives. He's one of the oldest souls out there. And yet, it seems like perfection isn't an easy thing to achieve, so how does everyone else do it? I don't know.

It starts of humorous where we know that a shark will kill him in a little while (and it does). Then he meets up with Death, who is a woman (like Gaiman's) and he's been having a love affair with for the past 8000 years. Then he's reincarnated again.

Some of the vignettes into past lives are whimsical, even to the point of revisiting that time he died being flung out of a catapult. But then there's a future life where he is a smart child who is in college and gets tried as an adult for assaulting a woman (he did not, the scene plays out) and he's sentenced to a penal asteroid. Once there, the humor stops. It's absolutely brutal, and the tone of the book changes. And yet for all he suffers and manages to achieve despite that, he ends his own life before he can get to Perfection.

Let's face it, when you know that you're only a third of the way through the book, unless there's a major twist, you know he's going to get tripped up every step of the way. Several of the sections just seemed to go on way too long (much like Milo's existence?) and had little point to them.

The lives aren't in chronological order. There's a bit of timey-wimey stuff happening. He's goes from the future to Buddha and back again.

In the end, there isn't much of a payoff. On Good Reads, I was tempted to give it 2 stars, but it was better written (for what it was) than other stuff I'd given 2 stars to. It's not as good as some of the stuff I've given 3 stars to, however. Most of the book group settled on 3 out of 5 for it.

Not the worst book I read for the book club, but far from the better ones.