A Journey into the Spirit World as Told by an Observer, or, What Dreams May Come

I saw the film adaptation of Richard Matheson's What Dreams May Come years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. But I didn't at all expect when I read the book to be met with something approximating a fictional version of all the research I had done on Spiritualist beliefs. I say approximate, because Matheson says in his preface that he believes these celestial spheres to exist just as the Spiritualists and Theosophists described them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I couldn't not see those similarities, and in that way this book lost a lot of the luster the film carried for me. Additionally, the plot and its pace were plodding - the scene of Chris dying and realizing that he's dead were as good as I expected them to be, but that's where the wonder ended. All of the plot points in the film that make the story so poignant - the premature death of his children and the connection to his living wife through her painting, are absent here. There's no mention of paintings whatsoever, and even the circles of hell that are described don't convey the same visceral reaction of the film's aesthetic. Without that sense of urgency in the plot, there's not a whole lot happening in this book, which just makes it a lot more like all those other Spiritualist books and pamphlets I've read, except not, because it's kind of parading as some weird blend of fiction and nonfiction. I just don't know what I was supposed to get out of this that I wouldn't have potentially gotten out of reading one of the sources he'd used during his research.

K. Rating: 1/5