Under the Whispering Door
A surprisingly cathartic tale of love and tea after death.
Wallace Price is unlikeable within the first page, his character is quickly and skillfully set in the “Scrooge” category without anyone needing to say “asshole”, though you are likely to think it.
Then Wallace is dead.
Wallace is taken from the big lawyer high rises, away from his expensive suits and brown nosing minions to a tea shop in a mountain town in the middle of nowhere.
And that’s when the real story begins.
Wallace is joined by his firey reaper Mei who’s always ready to fight off an attack, the tea brewing ferryman Hugo, a ghost named Nelson who embodies “cantankerous” with every ounce of his celestial being and ghost dog Apollo. This assortment of beings gathers to help and guide Wallace to the afterlife, whatever form that may take for him – their jobs are solely to be there for him in his path to the “door”.
By day Hugo and Mei work in their tea shop while the ghosts chat and terrorize deserving patrons and in the evenings, they work to help Wallace and others like him find what they need in order to walk through the door. Some folks are ready to cross that threshold in a day and the longest anyone has stayed has been two weeks… but after struggling through the phases of grief Wallace wants to stay on just a bit longer. The threat of corporeal disintegration and zombified ghost husks isn’t the only thing that keeps Wallace in the shop, it’s something more, it’s the feelings he’s having and learning what it is to have friends.
Wallace builds something he never bothered to have when he was alive, a family, friendships and maybe love. As he grows, he learns to do for others, something he’d never have bothered with when he was flesh and bone. From drinking tea and haunting a ouija board to helping grieving parents find peace, Wallace sets about doing things that would make him completely unrecognizable to his pre-heart attack self. Wallace begins to truly care about things beyond himself and it might bring a tear to your eye at times the way he goes about it.
It’s all evening walks in the garden, humping ghost dogs and wardrobe malfunction fun until Management reminds Mei and Hugo that this is a job – and there is a deadline looming.
It’s a familiar enough tale of a jerk finding his humanity seemingly after he’s lost the chance to human – but in an unfamiliar way
At first, I worried that the “gee I was a selfish loathsome guy” introspection starts kinda quick considering how much of a thoroughbred prick Wallace was in life but my concerns were quickly put aside. Fortunately, there is a good lengthy personal development for our antagonistic protagonist that doesn’t feel like anything’s been shoehorned in. Wallace really seems to recognize the depths of his churlish ways, see and feel the shame in it and grow from it, he grows into a feeling human in death and grows to love himself truly.
This book was much more emotionally gratifying than “The House In the Cerulean Sea” and less predictable; that could just be because I as a reader find death to be a pretty heavy subject and this book is all about life and death. Without spoiling the ending, I did imagine that we’d reach a similar tally in terms of “alive” and “dead” characters but I wasn’t sure how we’d get there and I appreciate being surprised.
As an LGBTQ+ reader it was wonderful to read a book with gay and bisexual characters where their sexuality wasn’t some tragic affliction and we didn’t need to go through a painful coming out phase etc. It simply was a part of the characters, it felt like a normal story but one that I could connect with a little extra. I’m so glad to see more of that hitting the shelves and cinema, young baby gay me would have been tickled to witness something like this in the wild.
The world that Klune has crafted here is much like our own but with some fantastic extra elements and it is definitely a world I’d like to visit again should he choose to return us to Charon’s Crossing Tea and Treats. Definitely a read I’d recommend and it will pair well with some peppermint tea.
Big thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan-Tor/Forge for the advanced reader copy. Absolutely tickled to be an early reader.
Author: T.J. Klune
Publisher: Macmillan-Tor/Forge
Pages: 384
Format Read: ePub
Publication Date: 21 September 2021
Check out the author and publishers on social media:
@tjklunebooks @tjklune @torbooks @forgereads @macmillanusa
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