One doesn’t read a Gary Barwin novel, they sink into it, immersed deeper sentence by sentence. Pages, entire chapters pass before the reader realizes how deep they are, how stuck. The Comedian’s Book of the Dead draws the reader in by fifths and quarters, and before you know it, the forest has closed around you and there’s nowhere left to go but forward.
Barwin’s latest novel follows a stand-up comic who has become Death, tasked with escorting the souls of the departed to the afterlife. He is also a husband to Betty and father to Grigory. The balancing act between the job and family, between life and death, provides the dramatic torque of the novel.
The narrator, Death, begins the story with key moments in his life, stories of his son, falling in love with his wife, the importance of chess passed down from father to son. It is an ordinary life, filled with the love and magic that animates each of us. Barwin excels in the building of these relationships, in the tiny details that cement the bonds between father and son or husband and wife.
As we get deeper into Death’s narrative, we see his life in the “Above” fall apart. Death takes it upon himself to abuse his power for his own ends, which unleashes a chain of events that carries us through to the end of the novel. We’re familiar with the concept of trying to “cheat death,” but what happens when Death himself cheats?
We’re familiar with the concept of trying to “cheat death,” but what happens when Death himself cheats?
Barwin builds his afterlife from scraps of Judeo-Christian lore and Greek mythology. Doing so allows for world building without taking his narrator, and the reader, so far into fantasy that we lose the tether to the mortal realm and to the narrator’s ordinariness. There is still the mystery, wonder and pyrotechnics of the “Beneath,” but it is familiar enough to not distract from the thrust of the plot.
Short, unnumbered chapters give the effect of the nebulous set changes between dreams, not jarring but seamless. As the book progresses, the reader begins to feel more and more untethered from the material world, which allows us to “forget” some of Death’s most unforgiveable sins. We end up rooting for him, for his son, but we know the transactional relationship at play. Debts have to be paid.
Disarming portrayals of death are nothing new, think Robert Redford in The Twilight Zone, but few can write Death like Gary Barwin. This novel can be touching, it can be funny, and it’s not without disgust and heartbreak. Although there is no shortage of the supernatural, mortal flaws and frailties govern the story. At its core, The Comedian’s Book of the Dead is a love story and something of a redemption arc that falls short. The reader sees deeply into a man’s soul, the ugliness and pettiness that can have violent effects on the people around him, as well as a father’s love for his son. This novel is a fast read that will linger, and another impressive entry in Barwin’s already impressive bibliography.
Gary Barwin is a writer, musician, and multimedia artist and the author of thirty-five books of poetry, fiction, and essays. His novel Yiddish for Pirates was a national bestseller, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction. Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy was chosen for Hamilton Reads, won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Fiction, and was shortlisted for the Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature for Fiction. The winner of the League of Canadian Poets’ Life Membership Award, he has been twice shortlisted for their Spoken Word Award. Barwin lives in Hamilton, Ontario.
Publisher: Book*hug Press (September 22, 2026)
Paperback: 5.25″ x 8″ | 232 pages
ISBN: ISBN 9781771669887
Jeff Dupuis is a writer and editor living in Toronto. He is the author of The Creature X Mystery novels and numerous short stories, which have been published in The Ex-Puritan and The Temz Review among others. Jeff is the editor, alongside A.G. Pasquella, of the anthology Devouring Tomorrow: Fiction from the Future of Food, which will be published in 2025 by Dundurn Press.
