Gina Ranalli. Suicide Girls in the Afterlife. Seattle: Afterbirth Books, 2006. 120 pp. Paperback. ISBN 0976631083.

Suicide Girls in the Afterlife is the strange and witty story of Pogue Eldritch, who commits suicide and finds herself a guest in a second-rate hotel full of opera music and bad food. Like her previous novel, Chemical Gardens, in which a group of punk rockers end up in the Seattle underground on an Oz-like journey, Suicide Girls also narrates an odyssey through a strange place. Both novels are enriched by Ranalli’s edgy, satirical sense of humor. Narrated by Pogue herself, Suicide Girls parodies received ideas about what such unknown places as Oz and the afterlife are really like while inspiring compassion and empathy for the narrator.

Ranalli compellingly uses elements of popular culture and worldly details to depict the afterlife as well as absolute “good” and “evil.” Her Satan character is a Goth who takes Xanax for his “battle against depression and anxiety,” and her overall vision of death is life itself made strange and unfamiliar. To do this Ranalli appropriates aspects of both religious stories and the secular. In depicting Jesus as the quintessential hippie, for example, she describes the pins that decorate his shirt: “smiley faces, more pot leaves, The Grateful Dead.” Having succinctly characterized both Jesus and Satan through their fashion sense, the book mixes the commercial with the holy in ways that are humorous, blasphemous, and altogether delightful.

Like Chemical Gardens, Suicide Girls takes a traditional story such as The Wizard of Oz (or, in this case, the afterlife) and turns convention on its head through the use of counterparts and parody. Ranalli gives religious conceptual spaces such as Purgatory and Limbo hilarious, well-imagined materiality: Limbo is a shabby fee-free hotel that gets progressively worse as one journies further down, and Purgatory is the floor between floors in this threadbare hotel, represented by a “Floor 4 ½” in the elevator.

I particularly enjoyed these descriptions of the hotel floors in which guests are placed in a tiered system, good guests being in the more luxurious suites and the suicide-murderers on the lower floors with peeling wallpaper and malfunctioning chandeliers. Filled with fun, dynamic characters as well as witty dialogue, Pogue’s exploration of the floors introduces several minor characters, all of whom are fully described and characterized within a small narrative space, such as Lithia, the aged, liquor-drinking, bathrobe-wearing ex-Rockette who insists between cigarettes: “Look at these yams!”

After her journey, Pogue is eventually given a second chance at life, and while this book is filled to the brim with satire, it still has heart. Suicide Girls in the Afterlife is ideal reading if you enjoyed Ranalli’s previous book, if you are looking for an introduction to her work, or if you simply want something intelligent, offbeat, and fresh.

— Kristina Marie Darling