Guest Post and Giveaway: and Giveaway: Thereafter (Afterlife #2) by Terri Bruce

Published: May 1st, 2014

Description:

When recently-deceased Irene Dunphy decided to “follow the light,” she thought she’d end up in Heaven or Hell and her journey would be over.

Boy, was she wrong.

She soon finds that “the other side” isn’t a final destination but a kind of purgatory where billions of spirits are stuck, with no way to move forward or back. Even worse, deranged phantoms known as “Hungry Ghosts” stalk the dead, intent on destroying them. The only way out is for Irene to forget her life on earth—including the boy who risked everything to help her cross over—which she’s not about to do. 

As Irene desperately searches for an alternative, help unexpectedly comes in the unlikeliest of forms: a twelfth-century Spanish knight and a nineteenth-century American cowboy. Even more surprising, one offers a chance for redemption; the other, love. Unfortunately, she won’t be able to have either if she can’t find a way to escape the hellish limbo where they’re all trapped.

Author’s Note: 

I am THRILLED beyond all measure to finally be able to bring you Thereafter, and I want to thank all the fans who have waited (more or less patiently) an extra year for this book to finally come out. Thereafter would not have been possible without your support—thank you all! I hope you love this beautiful new cover as much as I do, and I hope you find Thereafter to be worth the wait.

GUEST POST:

The Hope of an Afterlife

Hi everyone! I’m so happy to be here today on Mythical Books to talk about the afterlife. My latest novel, Thereafter, the second book of the Afterlife series, is about a woman who has to learn how to navigate the afterlife after she dies. I find afterlife mythology and folklore fascinating and I ended up doing a lot of research for the series so that I could incorporates beliefs and traditions from every culture and religion into the story.

Mankind has always dreamed and speculated about what comes after life here on Earth. While views on what comes after have varied from culture to culture and from time period to time period, there has almost always been a prevailing view that there is something after death. Almost always, this something involved going to a better place or world and/or going to live amongst the gods.

Often the mythology of life after death was built on observing the natural world and trying to find explanations for unexplainable phenomenon. The Aztecs noted that growth/life often followed death or fallowness: spring follows winter, decomposing plants and animals give rise to healthy plants and insects (maggots, flies, etc.). The Aztecs concluded that life came from death; that is, first we are dead and then we are alive (rather than death following life). They engaged in ritual sacrifice and it was deemed an honor to be selected, because they believed one’s death would bring rejuvenation and new life to their people and lands. The idea of a life and death following each other in an endless cycle remains with us even today.

Many cultures believed that death involved a journey, leaving the physical plane and going to reside with the gods. The dead were dressed for traveling and buried with all the items they would need to reach the home of the gods—weapons, food, riches, and sometimes even a means of transportation (such as a boat or a horse). To this day, most Western cultures bury their dead dressed in nice clothes—as if the dead person were undertaking a journey. Contrast this with Victorian times, when the dead were often buried in a shift or long white gown, denoting the belief that the dead were going to an eternal sleep (that is, that there was nothing after death). How we dress our dead for burial can often tell us a lot about what the living believe the afterlife holds for us.

In addition, as a way to explain unexplained phenomena (such as mysterious illnesses or bouts of ill fortune), the living looked to the mysterious realm of life after death, giving rise to a belief in ghosts, spirits, and demons. As mankind’s scientific knowledge has increased, we’ve moved away from a religious or superstition based explanation for the existence of an afterlife to a more science-based one. Could part of us live on after death? We know that there is much to the universe that we have yet to discover and that we may yet find that the afterlife is quite possible, though perhaps not in the way we have pictured it. 

The Catch-22 of the afterlife, however, has always been that if it’s so great, how come we don’t all rush to go there? This was one of the questions I had to answer in my Afterlife series—Jonah Johnson, the fourteen-year-old boy who can see dead people thanks to a mystical meditation that he learned, prefers to hang out with the dead than the living. The other characters, including Irene Dunphy who is dead, are scared of his fascination with the afterlife, worrying that he’ll try to cross over to the realm of the dead. As I was writing the story, however, one thought kept occurring to me: why would it be so terrible if he did? If the afterlife is so great, if it’s an opportunity for eternal happiness and to never be hungry or cold or tired again, why wouldn’t we all rush to go there? The answer, of course, is that all of the afterlife stories involve a catch: you can only go to the “happy” afterlife if you’ve lived a good life on Earth. Sometimes “a good life” simply refers to the manner in which you died (dying heroically, in battle, or of old age); other times it refers to the manner in which you lived/living a virtuous life. It’s this “catch” to keep us all from running off to join the afterlife that makes me suspicious of the existence of an actual afterlife (or, at least, an afterlife like it’s described in the stories). However, I can’t say definitively what I believe. For now, I remain fascinated by the various beliefs of what happens to us after we do and how to prepare for our journey into the unknown.

EXCERPT

TOUR SCHEDULE

Her hand touched a rock, one of the flat beach stones she’d seen on graves. She picked it up, laying it flat in her palm. She didn’t remember picking this up. In fact, she had been careful not to take any. It had seemed disrespectful and too much like stealing to remove them, and while she’d seen a few here—both loose and piled in cairns—she hadn’t picked any of them up. There had been no point. What would she do with a rock?

No wonder her bag was so heavy.

She tossed the rock over her shoulder and heard it hit the ground with a satisfying thud some distance away. It felt good to be rid of something, to make a decision and be sure it was the right one.

She surveyed the pile again and then grabbed a small handful of paper animals. She picked one up between a finger and thumb. It was a horse. Irene had been in Chinatown during Chinese Ghost Festival, a holiday in which the living left offerings for the dead. These offerings included paper replicas of things people thought the dead would need in the afterlife—money, clothes, television sets, and even animals. Irene had admired the precise and delicate folds of the Origami figures and had picked some up to admire them more closely. Without thinking, she had dropped them into her bag and apparently been carrying them ever since.

Well, even Jonah couldn’t argue with her on this—there was no way she was going to need a paper horse on her journey through the afterlife. Plus, these didn’t hold any sentimental value. She cast the horse onto a nearby fire and watched as the paper curled and blackened in the low-burning flames.

The fire leapt and seemed to glow blue for a moment. Irene tensed—what was happening?

Thick black smoke began to rise slowly from the flames, spiraling upward in a thickening column. The smoke grew denser and then elongated sideways. Irene leapt to her feet and backed away, her heart pounding. Something was forming in the fire.

The smoke was taking shape now; there was purpose and design in its movements. She could see a long, horizontal back, four legs, a neck, and finally a head and a tail. The smoke swirled with a final flourish and then shuddered into the solidity of a smoke-colored horse. The animal blinked passively. Then it violently shook its head, blew out a breath, and delicately picked its way forward out of the fire. It immediately put its head down and began to lip the ground, looking for food.

Irene stared stupidly at it. “Are you shitting me?”

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About the author:

Terri Bruce has been making up adventure stories for as long as she can remember. Like Anne Shirley, she prefers to make people cry rather than laugh, but is happy if she can do either. She produces fantasy and adventure stories from a haunted house in New England where she lives with her husband and three cats.

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