When Chuck Robbins died in a car accident, he was surprised to find that, as a fifty-percenter (someone precisely balanced halfway between good and evil), he must now serve a long term as a death – an employee of Death, Inc., assigned to reap souls for Heaven or Hell. He learns the ropes, and finds himself doing all right, thanks to his exemplary hacking skills, which allow him to choose his targets. But between the intervention of a powerful sorcerer who has it in for any death who comes looking for him, and the fact that his boss, the primary and original Death, is going to war with Lucifer over the coming of the Antichrist and needs Chuck’s computer skills to win, Chuck may be in for a more exciting afterlife than he ever expected.
Babineau has a marvelously bizarre sense of humor, and there are a number of unexpected delightful moments in this book. The world he creates is interesting, offbeat, and well worth exploring, and the commentary on soulless corporate drudgery is entertaining if unsubtle.
Unfortunately, the book really needs a good editor, both to fix the many punctuation issues and homophone mix ups (“in vein” rather than “in vain,” for example), and to smooth out the writing style. The humor is sometimes a bit too brash for some readers (if you find the concept of Jesus handing out cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, or the Archangel Gabriel walking among us in the form of David Bowie, to be more blasphemous than funny, this book is not for you). Also, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have a strange tendency to engage in outpourings of sentiment that don’t really seem to fit their characters. Finally, anyone who quotes Labyrinth as readily as Babineau does has no business mocking stereotyped “nerds”.
DONE WITH DEATH is a fun story and a great concept, but the book needs substantial editing and rewriting if it is to live up to its potential.
Reviewed by Catherine Langrehr for IndieReader