Review: Imaginative but also depressing and slow
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 06 2, 2014
In the Author's Afterward, he explains that the movie Ghost was the inspiration for this story.  But there is an important difference between the movie and this story.  In the movie Ghost, the ghosts could interact with the real world by manipulating objects and communicating with psychic mediums.  But in this story, ghosts cannot interact with the real world; instead, they can only passively observe the people and objects in the real world.  As a result, all meaningful activity takes place in the ghostly realm -- the real world is mostly just used as scenery.Additionally, the ghostly realm is depicted as a lonely place.  And since the ghosts cannot change anything within the real world that they co-inhabit, their world also had a mind-numbing sameness to it.  So escape is essential, but attempts to escape only seem to result in excruciatingly painful failure.Unfortunately, for me, the above plot choices made Physics of the Dead depressing, and so a bit to a slog to get through.  Since this book is about the dead, perhaps I should have anticipated the depressing nature of much of this story.  And in the author's defense, his depiction of the ghostly realm was quite imaginative.This story is actually somewhat similar to The Stone Man (which I gave 4 stars) in that both books have two main characters thrown together under very unusual circumstances (and characterization is a strong point in both books).  But The Stone Man was able to hold my attention much better than this book did.Note: There were more Kindle errors than seem typical.  I noted about 10 them in case the author would like to correct.