Review: Alice Isn’t Dead by Joseph Fink

Title: Alice Isn’t Dead

Author: Joseph Fink

Length: 355 Pages

Category: Horror

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: Alice Isn’t Dead is the trippiest of road trips. I was told a horror story that I couldn’t look away from and didn’t want to until it came to its end.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: “This isn’t a story. It’s a road trip.”

Keisha Taylor lived a quiet life with her wife, Alice, until the day that Alice disappeared. After months of searching, presuming she was dead, Keisha held a funeral, mourned, and gradually tried to get on with her life. But that was before Keisha started to see her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over America. Alice isn’t dead, and she is showing up at every major tragedy and accident in the country.

Following a line of clues, Keisha takes a job as a long-haul truck driver and begins searching for Alice. She eventually stumbles on an otherworldly conflict being waged in the quiet corners of our nation’s highway system—uncovering a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.

Review: “It’s often said that bad experiences are like nightmares.”

From the mind of the co-creator of Welcome to Night Vale comes a story about anxiety. That’s Alice Isn’t Dead at its simplest—Joseph Fink scraping against what’s always there inside of him and creating a character in Keisha who discovers her fears can also be her greatest strengths. When facing a multitude of horrors while in search of her wife, Alice, who was presumed dead and mourned deeply, Keisha pulls immense courage from her basest terror. Because, as Fink notes, “Just because fear is often irrational doesn’t mean that the world isn’t a scary place.”

This isn’t only a story about anxiety, though; it’s also an allegory about hate and the ugly transformation of those who are so utterly consumed by it as to morph them into drooling, gibbering blobs of flailing murderous meat sacs. That’s where the horror in the novel lies: in the grotesque war Keisha stumbles into as she crisscrosses the country not only searching for Alice but for answers. The cruelty of Alice’s abandonment cut so deeply that Keisha isn’t sure whether she’s looking for Alice’s explanations or to hurt Alice in return. The resolution empowers Keisha so beautifully, which I appreciated not only for its honesty but the way Keisha took care of herself and her feelings in the process.

Unlike so many fictions where it’s easy to become absorbed by and get lost in the story and characters, there is never a moment where I forgot the author is the narrator of this novel. His presence is not as a character but as translator and conduit of the macabre and chaotic goings-on as Keisha comes closer to Alice and the truth, which might be a result of this being a Podcast before it was a novel. Whatever the case, Alice Isn’t Dead is the trippiest of road trips. I was told a horror story that I couldn’t look away from and didn’t want to until it came to its end.