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Outstanding
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Library Journal Barbara Hoffert
Beautifully written and brilliantly realized, this imaginative work... delivers a startling sense of what it really means to be alive. [15 Feb 2006, p. 106]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
[The] subplots are... convincing and reflect on relationships in a beautiful, delicate manner.
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Favorable
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The Guardian Colin Greenland
The Brief History is both formal and heartfelt, an elegiac fabulation on the fragile, ignorant beauty of human life.
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Favorable
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USA Today Anita Sama
Brockmeier's roots in the tradition of science fiction and fantasy are evident, although in this relatively brief book, he reaches wider than merely charting the apocalypse. There are many levels, each interesting.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Laurel Maury
Brockmeier's book is the only modern thriller I've read that's literary and scary too. [11 Mar 2006]
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Favorable
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PopMatters Gerry Donaghy
In Brockmeier's prose, the characters are not forged by the infrequent trial or tribulation they experienced in life, rather they are defined by the accumulation of the small details they never bothered to notice. The slow-motion apocalypse that the characters experience gives these memories, as well as the reading experience, added poignancy. Another terrific aspect of this book, and one that keeps its lugubrious subject matter from veering into saccharine sentiment, is the author's vision of the future. It's a future mired more in corporate hubris and idiocy than it is fascistic dystopia.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Roger Gathman
Can we imagine the struggle to find a radio transmitter is enough to fill Laura Byrd's heart? Is she happy in Camus' sense? It is a flaw in Brockmeier's control of his novel that we feel he is never really sure of the answer to that; it is a virtue of the novel that it makes us intensely feel the question
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Favorable
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Chicago Tribune Brian Bouldrey
One might think that, given the subject of Brockmeier's tales, his task of separating grief and grievance is a morbid preoccupation. But this writer has nothing but an enthusiasm for life, and the marvelous inventions of his stories, both lovely and loving, are a tremendous infusion of energy in an often exhausted and exhausting world. [19 Feb 2006, p. 8]
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Gregory Kirschling
The Brief History of the Dead... is meticulously imagined. And his writing is as elegant as it was in 2003's The Truth About Celia, even if the end result isn't as wrenching.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
After a charming first chapter that imagines highly individual "crossings" to the other side, a novelistic virus called "The Flicks" debilitates the rest.
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Mixed
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Booklist Allison Block
Although it never quite lives up to its promising premise, the novel's Borges-like spirit will appeal to select readers. [1 Jan 2006, p. 52]
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
The Antarctic sections are rendered in fierce detail, so that Laura's story becomes an emotionally grounded adventure tale... The city narratives of the novel are more problematic, perhaps a victim of their own success. Brockmeier has realized his city of the dead with arresting clarity, but there's something odd, or slightly woozy, about getting involved with a bunch of ghostly transients.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Andrew Sean Greer
Brockmeier has teased some intriguing new ideas out of the last-man-on-Earth genre -- especially tying in the fate of the afterlife to the fate of those living -- but he has missed out on the great beauty of imaginative literature: metaphor.
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Mixed
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The Onion A.V. Club Keith Phipps
The only trouble is that the book, like life in the city itself, starts to repeat itself, and after a tour de force opening chapter, it crawls toward an inevitable conclusion. Brockmeier's prose never loses its lyricism, however, and his slow-motion fade-to-black has such a beguiling sadness that it's easy to want to savor even life's most mundane pleasures after leaving its pages.
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Mixed
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The Independent Murrough O'Brien
For all its foibles, The Brief History of the Dead must be accounted a prodigy of imagination, insight and overwhelming tenderness.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Patrick McGrath
The bold premise at the heart of "The Brief History of the Dead" could have offered the best sorts of complex pleasures, narrative and metaphysical, that science fiction has to offer. Instead it merely flounders, a waste of a perfectly good idea.
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