(If you don’t love yourself today, you can buy this here at Bookshop)
Did any of y’all ever read Christian end times spec-fic? By that I mean books like Left Behind, This Present Darkness, and other religious novels focused on spiritual warfare, heaven, hell, and salvation. There are a lot of odd things about evangeliculture but in hindsight, these books are one of the oddest. They were meant to be uplifting but were mostly just a lot of mean-spirited judgement, self-righteous crowing, and infodumps disguised as holiness preaching. There were always side characters who had the nerve to be pretty, spoiled women who weren’t saved and they were always tortured and vilified in horrible ways to prove that even women with personalities can be forgiven for existing if they just suffer enough, or something like that.
Life After Death is basically the Black hood Muslim version of those.
The spoiled pretty girl is the main character and the afterlife theology is all Islamic, but other than that, this is just another fundamentalist shamefest disguised as a novel. The reviews of this were bad, beautiful people, and while I don’t put too much stock in reviews(ironically), I found myself thinking that even the most scathing opinions of this were far too kind.
The best way to tell you exactly how bad this sequel to The Coldest Winter Ever is just to summarize it plainly. Winter Santiaga, as unlikable as ever, gets a reality show contract fresh off of the fifteen-year drug bid that ended the last book. While filming the first scene of the show, she’s fatally shot by a false friend and gets sent to a sort of purgatory. While there, she experiences relatively low-grade physical torture until she gets into a relationship with the son of Satan, whose given name is–and I apologize, but I could not make this up– Dat Nigga. Descriptions of brand name fashion fly around constantly because apparently even hell has shopping malls. They have lots of very graphically described anal sex and he turns her into a snake, then a dog. Bestiality ensues. (Yuck.) She escapes him, is rescued by a bunch of Catholic nuns, makes friends with a white feminist and a college girl, and they escape the weird purgatorial convent, steal a car and go to a…nightclub??? For some reason purgatory has a nightclub and not only does everyone know where it is, no-one is freaked out by the literal giant demon DJ even though all of these people are very aware they are dead and not in heaven. While in line for the club, she meets Satan, then goes to seduce Satan. Eventually she finesses Satan into agreeing to let her open a fashion label in hell but the whole deal goes south because Winter is the same sociopath she was in the previous book and all of her schemes eventually go sour because even demons get tired of her personality. As a result, she almost gets thrown in hellfire, but is ultimately rescued by her incredibly preachy unborn twin children that she aborted in the first book and completely forgot about. (I also forgot.)
And then, believe it or not, it gets even weirder and worse.
The bad reviews are ALL TRUE, beautiful people. I should have believed them– don’t make my mistake. One star and a one-way ticket to hell for Life After Death.
(Beautiful people and fellow readers–I actually felt bad about including the affiliate links in this post because I do not recommend this book. There are plenty of others I do recommend though, so feel free to take a peek at the Equal Opportunity Bookshop if you’re looking for something good to read. Any purchases made at that link or any other link on this site may result in a commission being paid to this site because we have affiliate relationships. I promise those funds will not be used to purchase any other Sistah Souljah books, ever. Peace! )
Equal Opportunity Reader 