Review: Second Lives

Second Lives by P.D. Cacek
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

P. D. Cacek rocks! SECOND LIVES is an extraordinarily compelling novel which I classify as horror, science fiction, and literary fiction. The premise seems simple enough on the surface: three patients in one hospital in California die on the same date--August 24. That's not odd. In a large hospital, that fact might be fairly common. A fourth man dies after a swimming pool drowning. However, what is odd, even impossible, is that all four patients revive: suddenly, after being declared clinically dead. All four are at first diagnosed with retrograde amnesia: they have no memory, of course, of dying, nor even of their previous lives. The attending psychiatrist believes this may be a temporary condition, but it's not: apparently all four of those individuals are gone, permanently. The "occupants" of these four formerly dead, now living bodies are others. The psychiatrist, baffled and befuddled, eventually comes to accept their nature, and terms them "travelers." Apparently, there have been some other instances. All four individuals themselves previously died (two deaths due to violent confrontation, two due to accidents), none of them recently, and now find themselves ensconced in "new" physiques. Both the "newly returned" and the surviving families of three of the patients are at a loss as to how to react: their loved ones died, now they're alive, except they're not, this is somebody else.

Author P. D. Cacek approaches this baffling conundrum marvellously, giving really four different scenarios of working out these situations. She totally puts all the characters through their paces, and if we don't always admire some of them, certainly we are given a deep comprehension of their natures. Yes, there's character evolution, too, thankfully.
SECOND LIVES is a wonderfully stunning novel, and a definite candidate to reread.

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