Michael Karolewski’s THE SOUL SECTOR often feels like a fever dream of a story—its sometimes-bonkers rendering of the afterlife is similar, in some ways, to that of Beetlejuice. It’s a little more complicated than heaven versus hell, with Valcara positioned as a sort of purgatory: a monotonous world between worlds populated by the deceased from not only Earth but other, stranger places. A realm where souls become investments and currency, where its residents can gamble and place bets on the outcomes of human lives, where terrifying skeletal beasts from the Void consume souls.

After an almost-deadly encounter with one of these otherworldly beasts, Rose falls into Valcara and finds herself—along with her perception of the afterlife and her supernaturally-plagued Earth—forever changed. Once she discovers her younger sister Lizzie hasn’t properly ascended, Rose is drawn into a precarious deal to save her from damnation by becoming a human pawn, subtly manipulating other human “investments” for moral gain. But with corruption lurking in every shadow and the larger fate of the Earthlings at stake, Rose must overcome her own demons in order to rebel against an unjust system of life and death.

A fast pace and an expansive world with lots of moving parts make Rose’s first foray into Valcara somewhat difficult to follow, but, as the story develops, each little detail fills out an important aspect of the plot. From the sudden influx of odd supernatural occurrences to the mention of spiders crawling and weaving their webs, no singular minute detail is wasted. The afterlife-as-a-corporation premise gets new life here, where nothing is quite as it seems, rife with the same corruption and blackmail and disregard for human existence as the mortal world. An exploration of ethics and morality through this lens gives a surprising weight to the narrative, emotionally complex and heartfelt amid its zaniness.

Rose is perhaps the best human to stumble into Valcara’s corporate inner-workings; her longtime job at an insurance company almost perfectly mirrors the ruthless operations in what Valcara calls the “mortality matters” industry. She’s a refreshingly flawed protagonist, someone who falls back into old destructive habits—drinking and pills—to self-medicate her grief. She plays by her own rules, makes mistakes, uses people for her own gain. In a bid to help her sister’s soul find eternal salvation, she goes on a journey herself, helping others before she can confront her own demons and face her guilt and grief for Lizzie’s untimely death. The course of her friendships—particularly with Harold, her cautious coworker, and Jade, a troubled teen—are interesting and complicated, influenced by her own problems and shortcomings. And her brief moments of counseling from her childhood priest add yet another layer of depth and insight into her character: “Grief doesn’t have to be loud,” Father Renaldi advises a skeptical Rose. “Grieving is how you learn to live with pain and not let it cripple you.” Her frayed relationship with her mother and responsibility to her baby sister are the rawest, most heart-wrenching subplots of the novel. Rose’s childhood and how it shapes her life is sometimes brutally honest in its depictions.

There’s a certain sequence in the last act of the story—which unfolds like a horrifying nightmare, fragmented and poignant with a tangle of emotion—where that subplot culminates in a breathless pace. Rose’s personal arc is the strongest thread of THE SOUL SECTOR, her character growth the most satisfying without losing her smart-mouthed rebelliousness. Her quick wit and darkly comedic narrative adds the right balance of levity to her morose thoughts. Though the book is written in third person, it’s so close to Rose’s voice that it feels like first. “Sunday morning brunch,” Rose muses on a fraught trip back to her hometown, “where the holy and the hungover come together.” And while it does seem like the climactic sequence the novel builds up to gets resolved in a rush, the ending sets up an exciting shock of a twist for this first-in-a-series paranormal thriller.

Michael Karolewski’s THE SOUL SECTOR is a complex, emotionally charged story, a lesson in morality and coping with grief that introduces a wicked, beautiful, and sometimes zany rendering of the afterlife.

~Jessica Thomas for IndieReader