The Nevermind of Brian Hildebrand

Is there life after death? Or more to the point: Is there life after life? Because, sometimes, not dying is worse than death itself. Brian Hildebrand is in a coma. Severely brain damaged in the unlikely and self-inflicted accidental event of being run over by his own car, he is diagnosed as being in a permanent vegetative state; a no hope case kept on life support only at the stubborn insistence of his mother. Sounds grim, doesn’t it? But wait. This is a comic novel, and Brian is not the vegetable he is deemed to be. In fact, he is the narrator and protagonist of this possibly impossible tale. Unbeknownst to his caregivers, Brian is fully conscious, fully cognitive, fully aware, and, inexplicably, smarter than ever. A prisoner in his own frenetic brain, he has morphed into a polymath and multi-dimensional thinker, and is, somehow, able to tell his off-the-wall story as it veers tale-twistingly and mind-bendingly from the haunting to the hilarious, abetted by a far-out cast of characters, possibly of his own creation, possibly not. In his head, he consorts with angels, consults with ghosts, and dances with demons, with the clamor and chaos of many worlds simultaneously spinning about in his battered but upgraded brain. How Brian can accomplish all this is the overriding riddle of his saga that is resolved, perhaps, magically. Or maybe it’s all in his mind. His muddled but magical mind.