Mal’s life is over. Her afterlife is only just beginning… By turns irreverently funny and deeply moving, this debut contemporary fantasy is perfect for fans of They Both Die at the End and The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Nadi Reed Perez’s The Afterlife of Mal Caldera, which is out June 11th 2024.
Mal Caldera—former rockstar, retired wild-child and excommunicated black sheep of her Catholic family—is dead. Not that she cares. She only feels bad that her younger sister, Cris, has been left alone with their religious zealot of a mother, picking up the pieces Mal has left behind. While her fellow ghosts party their afterlives away at an abandoned mansion they call the Haunt, Mal is determined to make contact with Cris from beyond the grave.
She manages to enlist the help of reluctant local medium Ren, and together, they concoct a plan to pass on a message to Cris. But the more time they spend together, the more both begin to wonder what might have been if they’d met before Mal died.
Mal knows it’s wrong to hold on so tightly to her old life. Bad things happen to ghosts who interfere with the living, and Mal can’t help wondering if she’s hurting the people she loves by hanging around, haunting their lives. But Mal has always been selfish, and letting go might just be the hardest thing she’s ever had to do…
Funny, emotional and life-affirming, The Afterlife of Mal Caldera will have readers laughing one minute and sobbing the next.
Nightfall looked different when I headed back to my place. I couldn’t see shadows anymore. The world simply lost its color, the gray broken up here and there by halogen light. I could see in the dark just as well as daylight.
As I walked through my door, my skin prickled, hairs standing on end. I never thought I’d get to feel goosebumps again.
The silhouette of a man wandered my living room in the dark. His pale skin flashed bright as he drifted in and out of the moonlight slicing through the window blinds. He hadn’t turned on any lights.
It didn’t surprise me when our eyes met.
“Malena Caldera,” he said, with surprisingly good Spanish inflection. It startled me when he continued, speaking too fast for my already slippery grasp of my mother’s language.
I cut him off. “I don’t fucking speak Spanish.”
That wasn’t wholly true, but he’d caught me off guard, reminding me just how far the apple had fallen from the family tree.
“My mistake,” he said in English. Now his voice lilted with the echoes of a fading British accent. “I said I’ve been looking for you.”
I hoped he couldn’t see my gulp. “How the fuck do you know who I am?”
He looked like he could be Death. Between his timeless double-breasted vest and trousers, old eyes in a young, symmetrical face, and wide grin like a scythe. Not to mention his multilingual fluency. Perhaps he’d run late to our appointment.
“I always read the obits,” he said. “You never know who’s just arrived.”
“So you’re not here to drag me to hell?”
His teeth flashed bright as he laughed. “I’m flattered, but you have me mistaken for someone else.” He kept circling around me, rhythmically, restlessly, casting a sweeping glance over my apartment. Then he looked back to me, over his shoulder. “You live like this?”
“Not exactly.” I shrugged in affront. “I’m dead.”
“So am I. That’s no excuse.”
“I didn’t think I’d have company.”
“You sound disappointed.” He turned and tilted his head at me with a sympathetic pout. “Not so happy to find you’re not alone on the other side?”
“I’ve been enjoying the peace and quiet.”
“Or you’re resigned to it.”
I crossed my arms. “Look, you can skip to the part where you tell me what you want.”
It wasn’t like I had much to offer. He and I couldn’t possibly have use for money anymore, not that I’d had much in life. And I hadn’t died with anything on me to give. Though apparently, we could still touch each other. I had to hold myself back from wandering too far down that line of thought. It had been nearly a year since I’d last gotten laid.
“Just delivering some good news,” he said. “If you haven’t noticed, our eternal judgment appears to have been postponed. So why not celebrate?”
He slowly turned up his palm in offering.
I didn’t know who or what he might be, where on Earth or elsewhere he might mean to take me. Even if he weren’t an angel or devil or intermediary, only another ghost, something about him felt off—uncanny. At the very least, he had to have been here a lot longer than me. Too long.
But I hadn’t touched anything for what already felt like forever. There were so many little things I’d never given a second thought in life, not realizing how much I’d miss them. No more alarm clock, toothbrush, shower, towel, clothes, coffee, cigarette, keys, doorknob, rinse and repeat. Let alone a hand, something warm and alive—or lifelike, anyway.
Even if I didn’t care for this guy’s evangelical tone, I did like the way he’d undone a few shirt buttons, no tie, and rolled up his sleeves, showing off his forearms.
So I took his hand. I reeled back at the feeling, not just skin, but something more. Like I’d touched an electric fence, some force pushing or pulling against me.
He winked. In a blink, we weren’t in my apartment anymore.
Something pulsed. It started as if from inside me, from my phantom heart pounding in my ears. It branched through my veins, my body shivering rhythmically.
“What the hell?” I asked.
“Close, but not there yet,” said the stranger.
Above us glowered a dark mansion. I didn’t have to look twice at the broken windows and creeping vines to recognize it as haunted, and not only by the two of us. The pulse tugged like a tide, growing louder and louder.
“Are you ready to join the afterparty?”
He didn’t wait for my reply. I couldn’t tell if he pulled me after him, or if the pulse itself strung me along. My feet fell in time to the beat.
Before us stood boarded double doors, stained with an orange watermarked sign reading:
CONDEMNED
DO NOT ENTER
We passed straight through it.
Moonlight flooded through the glassless windows, glinting on the shards among the dirt and dead leaves beneath our feet. Glowing marble flowered into the columns and arches of a foyer, framed on each side by a grand staircase. All the crumbling plaster of the walls went from gray to blue where they weren’t covered with vines, their leaves quivering in time to the music.
That pulse lapped at my skin like a heartbeat. Wave upon wave of an undulation not quite in the air, not quite in my blood, but somewhere between.
“What is this place?”
He swept out a hand with pride. “Welcome to the Haunt.”
Across the foyer, we reached doors thrown open to let out a column of light. I lifted my hand, trying to shield my eyes as we swept inside. My fingers glowed. So did all of the ghosts.
Around us bloomed the remains of a ballroom, full of dancers. They flickered through the silver light like phantasms, all different eras of the dead. Skirts flowed through the floor and slowly rose up and up, past the ankles, past the knees. Suits loosened up and slimmed down again, finally losing the jacket and becoming slacks, turning into jeans. There were top hats, bowler hats, newsy caps.
Bare heads with pompadours and mullets, bobs and beehives. Some of them looked modern, like me.
None of them clashed, despite their different eras and styles of dancing. Some danced with their feet, their arms, others their hips and shoulders. Arm’s length from their partners, or arms entwined. Everyone mingled and blended perfectly, as if rehearsed. It must have been the band.
They were floating at stage height. In each of their hands, they held something even more intangible than they were, appearing with every pluck of a harp string, throb of a violin, strike of a drum, like a flash of gossamer and shadow. Even the pipes of a church organ flickered along the wall, as if illuminated by lightning. They played on the ghosts of instruments.
At last, I turned to the stranger, who watched me and waited as I took it all in.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I’m the host,” he said, like I ought to have figured that out already. “They call me Alastair.”
Somehow, I got the feeling that he hadn’t given me his real name.
He held out his palm again. “Come and dance.”
I wanted it. Of course I did. My feet were already tapping, my shoulders shaking almost involuntarily with the slightest echo of a shimmy. Not to mention the sight of my potential partner, with that ethereal face and infernal smile, went down like wine.
But I’d just died. It bothered me more than I cared to admit, now that I’d seen how it affected Cris. I couldn’t just shake that off with a little boogie.
Besides, this guy knew my name. No way he’d brought me here out of the kindness of his dead heart. I dreaded in the pit of my stomach what else he knew about me.
His grin made me shiver. “Or you could play.”
It felt like I’d just been shoved on stage. Lights in my eyes, making shadows of all the faces surrounding me, my bandmates waiting at my side for me to tap the cymbals. Once, I never felt more alive than in the breath of silence before an opening riff, sticks poised to strike.
My bandmates were gone now. I wasn’t supposed to be alone, standing there with no kit. I’d never had stage fright before, but my hands were shaking, eerily empty with nothing to clutch.
“We’re in need of a drummer,” said Alastair.
No fucking way. I couldn’t go back up there. It hurt my dry mouth to even speak, still tongue-tied just from imagining it.
“You already have one,” I said, gesturing toward the stage, or lack thereof. The moonlight wasn’t any more inviting, nor all the spectral faces.
“All the players take shifts, for a turn to dance.”
Well, this explained a lot. Contrary to what he said, I’d apparently already crossed over, straight to hell.
“I have to admit…” He looked me up and down, measuring the length of my gray chiffon skirt, counting the buttons done all the way up on my gauzy white blouse. I’d put it on for an interview, the morning of my last day. My final and forever outfit, delicate and prim, nothing like me at all. “You don’t look like a drummer.”
I nearly choked up. “Because I’m not.”
At last, I forced my feet to shuffle in the other direction, toward the doorway. He appeared before me so abruptly, I couldn’t help but flinch back. Even if he was only another ghost—who’d happened to die in an impeccable suit—he still gave me the screaming mimis.
His face twisted up in injury, suddenly not so pretty. “How on earth can you turn down this chance? As if you could possibly have anything better to occupy your time on this side?”
“You don’t know my”—I almost spat the wrong word—“afterlife.”
But I really did have something more important to do, and he seemed like the knowledgeable type. So I chanced the truth. “I need to get a message to the other side.”
His laugh made me tense up. “Why bother?”
I barely kept my mouth from falling open in indignation.
“No need to occupy yourself with the past,” he said. “It’s as dead to you as you are to it.”
“I can’t just stand aside and watch my sister fall apart.”
Admittedly, she’d been keeping it together so far, but I didn’t want to find out just how much she could bottle up before she finally popped.
He pursed his lips, shaking his head. “Then don’t watch.”
I opened and closed my fists, tempted to slap him, find out whether either of us would feel it. I’d been trying to curb my impulsive, destructive tendencies these past few years. And I didn’t want to burn this bridge just yet. So I just said, “I don’t dance.”
That worked even better than striking him, from the disbelief he struggled to conceal on his face. I permitted myself a moment to enjoy watching his cool facade fall apart.
Then, smoothing out his face save for the twitch of a smirk, he said, “Your mother didn’t teach you that, either?”
Luckily for him, I didn’t care to defend her honor. If I kept trying to have the last word, I’d be here all night. Instead, I laughed.
In the brief beat between songs, I managed to tear myself away.
“You shouldn’t wander alone,” he insisted. “No one will be around to help you if you start to go geist.”
I slowed, not turning around. “Geist—you mean poltergeist?”
“Have you seen any yet? That’s what happens if you spiral too far into your grief. It eats you from the inside.”
That must’ve been what the guys from the morgue had been talking about when they asked if I’d ever met anyone “disturbed”.
“I’ll take my chances.”
He called after me, just a hint desperate. “You’re going to regret it.”
Without looking back, I said, “That’s never stopped me from doing anything.”
I kept walking toward the front entrance. When I peeked to see if he was still watching, he’d disappeared. I grinned. I’d gotten the last word, after all.
There were plenty of other spirits here. I just had to wait until they weren’t so occupied. Surely I wasn’t the first to try piercing the veil.
I doubled back through the foyer and rushed up the left side of the grand staircase, my feet floating above the marble. Down the hallway on the second floor, I ducked through the nearest open door. I found myself in what looked like a bedroom, judging from the grand four-poster bed. It might’ve been the only bit of furniture in the room original to the mansion. Everything else looked modern, or at least, made in the last half century, mismatched and secondhand. As if some squatters had tried to get comfortable in the decay, covering the crumbling walls with posters, piling stacks of records and cassettes and CDs among the dust.
I lay down on the bed, the sheets beneath me forever made from lack of real use. Even if I could still sleep, I wouldn’t have been able to drift off with the noise reverberating through the walls. At least a lifetime of insomnia had given me plenty of practice staring at the ceiling, waiting for dawn.
But I struggled to keep my hands quiet. I still caught myself drumming sometimes, my fingers dancing with imaginary sticks, haunted by songs that could have been. Except on this side, they didn’t stay imaginary. Coalescing like plumes of smoke, my beloved old sticks became solid in my palms. The wood caressed smooth against callouses I’d lost years ago.
In my surprise, I dropped them. Rather than fall, they faded away to nothing.
If only I could do the same.
