Rules for Being Dead
By Kim Powers
It's the late 1960s in MicKinney, Texas. At the downtown theater and the local drive-in, movies—James Bond, My Fair Lady, Alfie, and Dr. Zhivago—feed the dreams and obsessions of a ten-year-old Clarke who loves Audrey, Elvis, his family, and the handsome boy in the projector booth. Then Clarke loses his beloved mother. And no one will tell him how she died. No one will tell her either. She is floating above the trees and movie screens of McKinney, trapped between life and death, searching for a glimpse of her final moments on this earth. The shattering answer haunts Rules for Being Dead, Kim Powers' darkly humorous and incredibly moving novel.
An unlikely love child of Mark Childress' Crazy in Alabama and Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, this book pays homage to the movies of the 1960s and vividly conjures the machinations of small-town Texas with a wicked sense of humor and an unexpected tenderness. Native Texan Kim Powers brings a steady hand to all proceedings, including a ghostly mother, an evil stepmother, a clueless father, and a full cast of misfits—all orchestrated within a lively plot which is anything but predictable.
“Kim Powers's haunting and spellbinding novel Rules for Being Dead reads like an intoxicating blend of the best of Shirley Jackson, Alice Sebold and Fannie Flagg. But Powers has created an original novel that is both a tender coming-of-age tale and a fascinating mystery that builds to a nail-biting climax. (…) With a deceptively subtle, breezy writing style, Powers pulls readers into his tasty and tantalizing mixture of empathetic characters, Southern gothic coming-of-age comedy, mystery and magical realism.”—STARRED REVIEW, Shelf Awareness
“Blending late-’60s nostalgia with a supernatural mystery, Powers’s emotionally complex tale gets the job done just right.”—Publishers Weekly
“In a story that’s both cagey and unfailingly entertaining, Powers explores life’s deepest questions and most profound mysteries. Only a writer this in touch with his own humanity could populate a novel with characters who, despite their flaws, failures, and eccentricities, are humane and good.”―Wally Lamb, author of I Know This Much Is True and She's Come Undone
“A tour de force in voice and structure, this uniquely heartbreaking novel―literary fiction meets boy detective―is somehow adorable and sinister at the same time.”—Hank Phillippi Ryan, award-winning author of The Murder List
“Rules for Being Dead is a rich and compelling novel about a mother and her sons that is filled with nostalgia, heartbreak, and a love that will never die. Kim Powers has created an unforgettable story about discovering the world through movies, engaging with the tougher realities of life, and learning to forgive the people around us and ourselves.”―Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club and Books for Living
“Get ready to be captivated by a lonely boy who’s lost in the world of ’60s movies and true crime and employs both of them to try to solve the ultimate mystery: what caused his mother’s mysterious death? And one more thing? Despite its title, this book is about learning how to live, with every breath you take.”―Deborah Roberts, ABC News Correspondent
“Rules for Being Dead offers a startlingly original perspective on misapprehension, forgiveness, and love and delivers its vision with a punch. I picked up the book and could not put it down.”―Elaine Neil Orr, author of Swimming Between Worlds
Hardcover - ISBN: 9781949467352 - $25.95
Paperback - ISBN: 9781949467857 - $18.95
Paperback edition available for preorders now. Will deliver in April 2022
Kim Powers is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The History of Swimming (a Barnes & Noble "Discover" book and Lambda Literary Award finalist for Best Memoir), the novel Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, and the newly released thriller Dig Two Graves. He's currently the senior writer for ABC's 20/20, and for his work at ABC News has received the Emmy, Peabody, and two Edward R. Murrow Awards. He also wrote the screenplay for the festival-favorite indie film Finding North. In 2007, he was selected as one of the "Out 100"—Out Magazine's most influential gays and lesbians in the country. A native Texan, he received an MFA from the Yale School of Drama. He lives in Manhattan and Asbury Park, NJ, where he is the host of the wildly popular BookFlix, an ongoing series of monthly interviews with authors and filmmakers. Past guests have included Junot Diaz, Robert Olen Butler, Hannah Tinti, and many others.
