Where do you go when you die? Heaven? Hell? Nowhere? Somewhere?
For Jacob, who wakes up one day in a grassy field with no memories, stained clothes, and a mysterious guide who takes him to a dormitory with other boys who had the same experience, life, or death, is a mystery with no answers. Is it heaven when the food is always the same, there is no joy except for sharing the merest fragments of memories with your roommates, and nobody can answer your questions? Is it hell when you are forced to pick up basketfuls of stones day after day, the penalty for missing a day of stone picking is a visit from ghosts, and you have dreams of despondent parents?
What is certain is that the boundary between dreams and reality is breached. Jacob wants answers and more. In time, all of his roommates will have similar urges, but this is Jacob's trial.
But a trial for what? Jacob's Ladder, by Brian Keaney, has rich possibilities in its plot, but they fall flat. The reader is expected to not need any answers as to what this place is, how one gets there, and how one leaves. There are workers in this place... do they not "move on?" This after-world is a dull and listless place. Given that this characterization is drastically different than 99.9% of other after-world depictions, it requires a modicum of explanation, and that explanation is not forthcoming. Thus, Keaney wets the reader's appetite, but no answers are provided.
Like The Brief History of the Dead, by Kevin Brockmeier, this novel seems incomplete. Jacob receives no clarity about why things are the way they are. Perhaps hell intentionally bypasses these questions.
