“Don’t look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes, you’ll know you’re dead.”

Our narrator Simeon is a middle-aged man who is mourning the loss of his husband Jonathan. He’s also recently lost his job. He has an ex-wife and a 16-year-old son. We don’t see much of the son, but I often got the impression he was younger than 16 due to the way his parents treated him and talked about him. With references to chat rooms and webpages buffering before loading, I initially thought this took place in the 1990s, but it turns out it takes place in the present time.

A dream is related at one point, but it’s too coherent to actually be someone’s dream. Real dreams are constantly in flux with people combining together, one person becoming two, sudden changes in location, and objects changing size and shape or turning into other objects. This is more like how dreams are depicted on TV. There was a fun dream-like detail, though, when Porcelain Khaw tells the parents he plans on covering their son with jelly to draw away insects.

Simeon joins a group called The Wretches who use pareidolia to deal with grief, which is delightfully weird. They look for their departed loved ones to appear in pictures they take, like people finding faces in clouds.

From the book description, I expected Porcelain Khaw to be a bigger part of the plot, but, except for the dream sequence, he doesn’t show up until near the end. His character and his beetles are delightfully weird, though.

The writing is good, but the plot moved too slowly and I found myself bored at times. There was too much internal monologue.

I like that Simeon’s relationship with Jonathan was troubled, but that doesn’t keep him from missing him. This felt real. The phrase “Ignore it” is repeated throughout the book to good effect. It gave me chills at one point. There’s a good surprise reveal near the end that I didn’t see coming. I like the concept of a reverse haunting in which the living won’t let the dead rest. The living haunt the dead rather than the other way around.