Dead guy falls in love with Grim Reaper - Under the Whispering Door by T.J Klune (Review)

 A/N: This review contains mild spoilers for Under the Whispering door by T.J Klune. This is your spoiler warning. 

If I read a book for this series and personally don’t enjoy it as much as I’d hoped, is it unfair of me to write a review? This is the dilemma that has plagued me for a few months now. Please feel free to share your thoughts on it while I continue to ramble about this book. 

Under the Whispering Door is a sweet, light-fantasy story with a hopeful message. The story starts when Wallace Price unexpectedly dies of a heart attack and no one cries at his funeral, because he was a pretty crappy person when he was alive. His funeral is sparsely attended- only his ex-wife and the partners at his law firm (Moore, Price, Hernandez and Worthington) turn up to attend it out of obligation. There he meets Mei who is a spirit-guide, someone whose job is to escort dead souls to the place where they can cross over to the next world or whatever afterlife is supposedly.

Mei guides him to Charon’s Crossing Tea Shop (which is obviously a reference to Charon, the boat-dude from Greek mythology) which is owned by Hugo Freeman, who is supposed to be the Grim Reaper. He works with the spirits of people to help them heal so that they can move on. And in death, Wallace’s ‘character development’ is finally triggered and he goes from call-the-manager-Karen to soft-peppermint-boi-Wallace. The Tea shop also has Nelson and Apollo, the former being Hugo’s grandfather and latter being his pup. Both of whom have been dead for a while. (Do not fear, there is no necrophilia here. Unless falling in love with a ghost, technically a dead person, is considered necrophilia. Then yes, your fears are valid.)

The central theme of the story is acceptance of death and the grief that accompanies it. Moving on and the fear of dying is explored along with the regrets people carry of all the things they miss out on in life. Because no matter how cheesy it sounds, you do only live once. (Let us not get into the reincarnation or religion debate. Please and thank you.)

T.J Klune is known for writing cutesy gay romances in cozy fantastical settings. While this book did not work for me personally, I do have to put it out there that I absolutely adored The House in the Cerulean Sea which I read two years ago. I was hoping to relive some of that melancholia with light magic that his writing is known for and so was disappointed. It does have some great elements of found family and classic humor along with great bisexual and gay character representation. But it was repetitive and I did not enjoy the ending. It felt like there was a lesson the author wanted us to learn and he builds up the whole plot towards this anticipatory climax and just decides against it at the last minute. 

While I adored Mei and Nelson and Apollo, the plot did little to warm my stone, cold heart. I guess this has to be the worst way to pitch a much-loved queer book, but if you ever want something sweet and melancholic with humor, this would be a great start. Or just pick up The House in the Cerulean Sea and thank me later.

A/N: I’m sorry I don’t have cute/ funny quotes to share this time. While I did annotate all my favorite lines when I first read the book, I don’t feel like I look back at those scenes with much fondness. I hope I get over this weird reading stage I’m in. I really wanna enjoy the books I read and it just hasn’t happened to me in a while. I seem to have some bad luck with books because I read Devdas by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay and Chokher Bali by Rabindranath Tagore and absolutely did not like either. Don’t even get me started on One Part Woman. 

I am sad. (Please send help and recommendations!)

Anyways. Thank you for reading the eleventh installment in my ‘Women of Words’ series where I read feminist literature by a new feminist author each month. T.J Klune is known for writing great queer stories so please do check him out, this review does not do him justice.

To read the previous installment, here’s my take on Yellowface by Rebecca. F. Kuang.