“I have been half in love with easeful death,” wrote John Keats, and the same may be true of Sid, the protagonist of Postcards from a Dead Girl by Kirk Farber. Taking on such heavy topics as love, death, guilt, paranoia, and depression, Farber gifts the reader with a story that seems as light as a puff of air, as silly as a dream, and as resonant as a box canyon.
Poor Sid. He’s a nice enough guy, working great hours in a crummy job — selling vacation and cruise packages over the phone. That’s right, he’s a telemarketer. That alone should make us unsympathetic to his plight, but as he tells his story we can’t help being drawn in and sympathetic. Sid is getting postcards from a girl who may be dead; we’re not quite sure if she’s literally dead or traveling the world, until the last few chapters. Sid saves the postcards and amasses a large collection. The haunting thing about the cards is that the postmarks are a year old. Were that not enough, his deceased mother is also talking to him via a very old bottle of Bordeaux.
Is Sid nuts? Is he sending the cards himself, or is the bratty little girl across the street somehow involved? What is Sid afraid of? We further question Sid’s mental state when he goes to the automated carwash and repeatedly rides through, enjoying the whole process of pink soap bubbles and blow dryers, maybe a little too much. When Sid discovers mud baths at a spa, he becomes obsessed with them, replacing his carwash obsession with sinking in a comforting tub of warm mud.
Sid has a number of problems, besides communications from the dead, and they are more familiar. He lives in a nice house that had been his childhood home and is too full of memories. Lucky for him, the mortgage is long paid off. His cell-phone reception is horrible and his house is in a “dead zone.” He is sinking deeper into debt as he uses the multitude of credit cards that he has collected, but cannot pay. The debt is escalating thanks to his obsessive car-washing and mud-bathing. He is having a hard time recovering from a failed love affair, the one that may have been the “love of his life.” He is confused and sometimes feels powerless. In the meantime, the postcards keep coming.
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