"The story of a girl begins with a boy. On Christmas morning, 1982, nine-year-old Jude Bendz survives the shocking and mysterious death of his twin sister, Mary. Bewildered by grief, he is comforted when, miraculously, Mary's ghost appears, her spirit quickly informing a series of fantastic apparitions through which her life - and death - come into clearer focus. Problems soon arise, however, when his sister, promising salvation, places him at the center of a wide, yet narrowing plot that increasingly puts his life in mortal danger. A novel that transcends its historical moment, Being Dead brilliantly subverts the conventions of the traditional Ghost story. Reconstructing her own death through a series of spooky visitations and cryptic clues that, in time, seem to assume the shape of formal challenges, Mary creates for Jude a blueprint that blurs the line between truth and revenge, love and hate, an account that threatens to shatter their family's perfect image. Luminous, evocative, and set amidst the decline of American exceptionalism and the nuclear family, this is at once an enthralling adventure, a stirring love story, and a work of striking power in the face of stark solitude. As Mary interweaves elements of a set past that portends a harrowing future, life rears up large and ripples against death's certain pressures, generating mesmerizing suspense and surprising empathy. Yielding poignant insights into the nature of love and loss, savagery and splendor, Being Dead asserts itself as a new American gothic-hugely powerful, majestically unassuming, and keenly unsettling"--