STRINGS ON ME

Aiden Strong meets new friends in the lands of the dead.

The 15-year-old protagonist who can (as it is redundantly put) “see the ghosts of dead people” enters a series of post-mortem pocket realms where, along with repeatedly failing to defeat a megalomaniac with a device that eats people’s hearts, he meets a group of deceased teens (who can “faze” through walls). He is attached to them by mysterious blue Trancey Strings, and the only way to cut the Strings involves revisiting the scene of each teenager’s death. Aiden goes on to witness suicides (one described at length in detail), murders, and a death in a house fire. Meanwhile, he saves one new dead friend but not another from something “like experiencing death again” in the flares of Infinite Flames. In one of several shoehorned-in side quests, a supporting character hits a mall with a nondead teen after everyone else on Earth somehow vanishes (temporarily, presumably). The writing is unfortunately muddled, repetitive, and in need of a stronger editorial hand: For example, Aiden’s curly hair is repeatedly and awkwardly mentioned throughout (“the curly-haired brother looked back at his straight-haired siblings,” “…the curly-haired male replied…”). Most main characters are assumed White; the one character identified as Black sacrifices her life to save a White person. The descriptions of mental illness in the context of a school shooting are troubling and feed into negative stereotypes.

An ambitious debut but too rough-cut for general release.