2020-01-26
A debut novel focuses on a journey through the Christian heaven.
At the beginning of Domexa's book, Mitch Campbell and his mother die in a car crash in July 2015 during rush-hour traffic in West Palm Beach, Florida. As the tale unfolds, Mitch is telling readers his story from heaven. Two months earlier, he had lost his brother, Edmund, in a random shooting. Edmund is just one of the many people Mitch encounters in paradise. There is also the flamboyant Flannighans L. Molard, a gay man who sometimes sold marijuana (apparently something Mitch considers a surefire barrier to salvation). Molard's presence surprises Mitch, who's still operating under his previously held ideas of what a person needs to do to gain entry into heaven. "According to popular belief," he reflects, "if you don't go to church every Sunday, pray as hard as prophet Elijah, pay one tenth of every hard dollar you've earned, make pledge to charities, and never kill mosquitos, some pastors say you're not going" to paradise. The more Mitch learns of heaven, the more he realizes the errors of those old ideas—although the process is very gradual despite all the religious and philosophical elaborations he hears from everybody there. "Mankind," he's told at one point, places "so much emphasis on sex, murder, and homosexuality as if these were the ultimate sins for which redemption seems almost inapplicable, while little lies, resentment, manipulation, selfishness, trifling and hypocrisy thrive among them." Domexa's writing style is relaxed and inviting, and his humor (particularly regarding Mitch's formidable mother) shines through in most sections. Furthermore, Mitch's eventful odyssey should spark some lively discussions. But the author's decision to make his version of heaven essentially West Palm Beach with limitless buffets will strike some readers as a bit ridiculous. There are French mansions, well-trimmed hedges, and Persian rugs, and readers are told that "most things" are made of "cherry, oak, walnut trees, gemstones and bamboo." Fortunately, this element serves the narrative's deeper purpose of putting a very human face on eternity.
An engaging, lighthearted, and thought-provoking fantasy about what heaven is really like.
