Description

A "dark and funny debut"(Seattle-Times) about a young police officer struggling to maintain a sense of reality in a town where the dead outnumber the living.

Colma, California, the "cemetery city" serving San Francisco, is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a by-the-book rookie cop struggling to settle comfortably into adult life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer attempts to navigate the drama of his own daily life, his own grip on reality starts to slip-either that, or Colma's more famous residents are not resting in peace as they should be.

About the Author

Doug Dorst teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Politically Inspired. He is also a former Jeopardy champion.

Praise for Alive in Necropolis…

"A daring and big-hearted first novel...Like Dashiell Hammett, Dorst conveys a hard-bitten love of the physical San Francisco."
-New York Times Book Review

"In the same way Buffy the Vampire Slayer mixed high school and bloodsuckers, Doug Dorst combines cops and ghosts in his Alive in Necropolis. The result is a haunted variation on Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series...Imaginative and accomplished... Pitch-perfect."
-USA Today

"Rich, unsettling...truly haunting."
-San Francisco Chronicle "An intriguing mix of coming-of-age story, police procedural, and magical realism."
-Seattle-Times