Alive in Necropolis by Doug Dorst

From the Publisher

A "dark and funny debut"(Seattle-Times) about a young police officer struggling to maintain a sense of reality in a town where the dead outnumber the living.

Colma, California, the "cemetery city" serving San Francisco, is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a by-the-book rookie cop struggling to settle comfortably into adult life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer attempts to navigate the drama of his own daily life, his own grip on reality starts to slip-either that, or Colma's more famous residents are not resting in peace as they should be.

Stephen Elliott

It would be a shame if Doug Dorst is written of as one of the best debut novelists we've seen in years. He's better than that. He's one of the best novelists we've seen in years, writing well beyond the level we've learned to expect of ‘first novelists' or ‘new voices.' He has the control and daring possessed by only the greats of each generation. He writes with humor and wisdom that is rare, and an empathy for his characters that is warm and complex and unique. (Stephen Elliott, author of Happy Baby)

The New York Times - Mark Costello

The left brain of this novel, the plotty, structured part, is a fine, familiar branch of California noir. Like Dashiell Hammett, Dorst conveys a hard-bitten love of the physical San Francisco, the fog-swallowed town, the sun after rain, the mineshaft drops in temperature. Scenes are rooted in surroundings and the weather. The fiction seems to possess, and be possessed by, its beloved Bay…The ghosts are a prime pleasure here. The prose picks up a quickness in their presence. They are figures out of newsreels, colorful, iconic.

Publishers Weekly

This charming first novel maps the landscape and lives of a small town where ghosts and the living are sometimes indistinguishable from one another. That's what police officer Michael Mercer discovers the night he saves the life of a teenage boy left unconscious and at the mercy of the elements in a Colma, Calif., cemetery. Later, Michael witnesses nocturnal incidents that turn out to be the afterlife activities of local residents who've been dead for decades. The repetitive and unresolved activities of the dead slyly parallel Michael's aimless life and the lives of friends and colleagues similarly mired in day-to-day routine. Though the supernatural elements aren't as well integrated into the main action as they might be, Dorst strikes a perfect balance between humor and pathos. His ability to show the magic potential of everyday lives marks him as an author to watch. (July)

Kirkus Reviews

Dorst's appealing debut features rookie cop Mike Mercer patrolling Colma, Calif., famed cemetery city in which the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. Shortly after he joins the force, Mercer discovers a teen victimized by a vicious prank: drugged, stripped from the waist down, duct-taped and stashed headfirst in a burial chamber. This is Jude DiMaio, well-meaning but impetuous son of a film director, and his story gets entwined with that of Mercer, whose romantic missteps are in many ways parallel. Other principals are Mercer's girlfriend, Fiona, a nurse many years his elder, and her potential rival, Kelly, a fun-loving journalist; Mercer's partner, Nick Toronto, behind whose barbed wit and aggressive facade lurks a softie; and a group of Mercer's privileged high-school friends, all groping bit by bit, as Mike is, toward maturity. Dorst nimbly juggles multiple plot lines and a complicated cast, and his account of the banter and brotherhood of cops rings true. Where the novel gets into trouble is in the daring subplot that might have been its triumph: Mercer gradually becomes aware that his predecessor, Officer Featherstone, had been waging a stealth campaign against-well, against a gang of hooligan ghosts who are terrorizing the other corpses. In Colma, whether he wants it or not, a peace officer turns out to have jurisdiction, too, over those who ought to be resting in peace rather than disturbing it. This gang of the undead commits acts of mayhem, but it's hard to take these acts seriously, given that the wounds they inflict mostly heal overnight and that Dorst often plays their antics for laughs. Ultimately, despite its promise, this story line seems mostly asideshow, overshadowed by the coming-of-age plot. A bit diffuse and too reliant on coincidence, but also often poignant and funny, especially about the self-destructive fools that love makes us. Dorst is a talent to watch.

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