It’s happened to almost everyone: You’re at a hotel, you turn on the
TV, and for some reason you start watching a movie you don’t recognize.
You initially think that the movie is a cop movie, but that cop isn’t
the main character. There’s some romantic tension, but it doesn’t
intensify. And something really funny just happened: Is this movie a
comedy? And why is the soundtrack doing that weird plucking thing with
the violins? Is something supernatural about to happen?
When people consume fictions, they experience an urge, so strong
that it feels almost reptilian in origin, to categorize the story
into a genre, even something as basic as drama. Doug Dorst’s
debut novel, Alive in Necropolis, toys with this urge and
manipulates the reader’s expectations to great effect.
Michael Mercer is a young police officer in the small California
town of Colma, just outside of San Francisco. One night he finds a
teenage boy in a cemetery, naked, duct taped, and beaten
unconscious. On recovering, the boy, who turns out to be the son of
a well-respected film director, claims to suffer from amnesia. There is
some mystery here, but the mystery seems like an afterthought. Mercer
is concerned about his girlfriend, who is much older than he is, but
it’s not a romance. Mercer befriends an old widow whose husband kept
meticulous reports of interactions with ghosts in Colma’s many
cemeteries, and Mercer starts to believe that he can see these ghosts
as well. Every 50 pages could be the beginning of a different sort
of novel. The reader consistently expects the plot to become
something comfortably identifiable, but the genius of Necropolis is that it never does.
Every few years, a talented creator will come along and wow the
critics with a piece of work that takes bizarre twists on classic
tropes: Quentin Tarantino with Pulp Fiction, Chuck Palahniuk
with Fight Club, Zadie Smith with White Teeth. Dorst has
not done that here; instead, he hints at tropes that all adults
understand unconsciously and tells a story that refuses to embrace
any of them. Nobody would describe his or her own life as a comedy,
or a tragedy, or a kidnapping drama. Dorst understands this, and
Necropolis is so vivid because, like life, it refuses those easy
labels.
One more twist: While reading Necropolis, I assumed that the
town of Colma—a cemetery town with 2,000 citizens
aboveground and more than 2,000,000 buried beneath—was a slightly
heavy-handed construct of Dorst’s, along the lines of the cemetery town
of Lud, New Jersey, in Stanley Elkin’s morose comic novel The Rabbi
of Lud. But Colma, with its name that suggests coma and its
unbelievable bumper-sticker motto “It’s great to be alive in Colma,” is
a real town with a real stop on San Francisco’s BART line. 
Doug Dorst reads Sat Aug 2, Elliott Bay Book Company, 2 pm,
free.