Initially, Wylene Dunbar's novel My Life With Corpses seems to turn on a simple but well-executed metaphor: Her protagonist, a philosophy professor who goes by the nickname Oz, claims to have been raised by dead parents, alongside a dead sister. In Oz's world, the dead walk, talk, eat, sleep, teach, study, and occasionally even bear children; the signs of death are many and subtle, but mostly have to do with profound emotional and intellectual frigidity. From her opening descriptions, death seems like little more than Oz's symbol for the internal point where an individual ceases to grow and change. But once the metaphor becomes confusingly concrete, the novel heads into a fairy-tale twilight where nothing seems entirely certain, save for Oz's dry, scholarly, seemingly untrustworthy observations.
Much of My Life With Corpses is devoted to Oz, as she grows up, goes to college, becomes a professor, and eventually oversees the disinterment of an old friend, whose grave yields only a copy of Oz's book about her dead family. Having lived among the dead from infancy, she was raised to see their emotionlessness and distaste for physical contact as natural, and living people periodically surprise and draw her. At the same time, corpses seem drawn to her in turn, and her teaching career and personal life are both haunted by death. Eventually, she begins fearfully following the progress of the emerging corpse in her own body.
But even though the dead are clearly the most important thing in her life, and while she spends the entire book tracking and naming the internal ailments that kill people (from being too emotional to being not emotional enough), Oz never seems curious about their role in the broader world, and never asks the seemingly obvious questions. (Why is she the only person who can detect corpses, even once they're reduced to mobile skeletons? What's the difference between the walking dead and the conventional corpses that wind up in the local graveyard? How does anyone in the world apart from her relate to the dead?) She simply reports on the deaths in her life, which occur so regularly that they all begin to sound alike. As a result, the book sometimes plods in spite of Dunbar's lulling prose, and the relentlessly introverted focus gradually becomes claustrophobic. From page to page, it's unclear whether My Life With Corpses is a fable, an elaborate prose poem, a philosophical construct, the autobiography of an insane woman, or a scientific taxonomy. But in any of these cases, it finds fascinating, haunting new ground, then drills into it over and over, digging itself into a dark and eventually dry well.