Reincarnation Blues Is a Joyful Cosmic Romance

In the afterlife of Reincarnation Blues, every human being gets 10,000 chances to achieve some form of “perfection” and join the cosmic consciousness known as the Oversoul. Fail, and you’re unceremoniously kicked off a cosmic sidewalk into an endless void, your soul destroyed in the process. Milo has lived 9,995 lifetimes, and he’s tired of it. He isn’y interested in achieving perfection. He is interested in Suzie, his personal, anthropomorphized representation of Death, and the hours they steal in the brief periods between his many deaths and return journeys to the land of the living. Suzie is more than just someone he spends the afterlife with, she’s the entity he wants to spend all of existence with—even if they both know that’s impossible. With five lives left to his name, Milo will need to think of something fast if he wants more time with her, something stupid—perhaps perfectly stupid.
With a constantly reincarnating hero and an almost infinite afterlife to play around in, Poore (Up Jumps the Devil) doesn’t let his story be limited by things like “genre” or “structure.” This is the kind of book where, if you aren’t feeling a particular section, all you have to do is wait a few pages for something new to come along. Milo’s lives range from a far-future romantic escapade gone wrong, to a dark fantasy-comedy vignette about beer brewing. Each life feels unique in tone and style, but still connects subtly to the whole, whether in recurring imagery or in small details of worldbuilding that carry over from life to life, like the personal AI assistant Milo designs while living out a life as a child genius that then appears in all subsequent sections. In one lifetime, Milo helps build a massive generation ship; in another, he’s a passenger on it. There’s a consistent sense that all the lives are part of a greater whole, as history marches each further down the timeline, revealing a kind of future history along the way.

But more than anything, this is a love story, and no love story truly works without great chemistry. From the jump, Milo and Suzie are a delight to spend time with. In the beginning, their friends who let the smaller slights slide, because “that’s how you get to be friends.” Later, amid Milo’s repeated attempts to help Suzie run a succession of terrible stores throughout the afterlife, they banter back and forth and have ridiculous arguments over his antics. They struggle to get past their low points, like when Milo arrives in the afterlife still pining for a previous marriage on Earth. You truly believe they mean the world(s) to each other, and that they’d enjoy each other’s company even if they hadn’t pushed together by cosmic circumstance, despite the melancholic sense that eventually, they’ll have to part for good, as Milo either fades away or is absorbed into a greater consciousness. And that hurts, because they’re great for each other—in a very organic, human way.
At its core, that’s what this is— a humanist tale of two people connecting on a deeply personal level amid impossible circumstances, tolerating one another’s faults, each making the other better through simple mutual understanding. It’s a genre-hopping story about two people fighting like for what they love, and a call to challenge the accepted order of things. It’s hilarious, and sad, and delightful from the first page to the last.
Reincarnation Blues is available now.