I say it over and over, Daniel Kraus is one of my favorite all-time authors. Even so, I continued to skip over the nearly 1,500 pages of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch due to its length. I have read plenty of longer books over the years, but I tend to put them off, only to regret the decision later. Turns out, Zebulon Finch is another example of this habit.
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume One: At the Edge of Empire
New York Times bestselling author Daniel Kraus is one of my, if not my favorite author of all time. However, I hadn’t taken the opportunity to dive into the Zebulon Finch duology due to a number of factors, one being the sheer length. Even after reading hundreds of books over the years, including a few hefty ones, I have a tendency to shy away from large books and most of the time I kick myself afterwards for avoiding, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch is one of those times.
May 7, 1896. Dusk. A swaggering seventeen-year-old gangster named Zebulon Finch is gunned down by the shores of Lake Michigan. But after mere minutes in the void, he is mysteriously resurrected. His second life will be nothing like his first.
Zebulon’s new existence begins as a sideshow attraction in a traveling medicine show. From there he will be poked and prodded by a scientist obsessed with mastering the secrets of death. He will fight in the trenches of World War I. He will run from his nightmares—and from poverty—in Depression-era New York City. And he will become the companion of the most beautiful woman in Hollywood.
Love, hate, hope, and horror—Zebulon finds them. But will he ever find redemption?
Kraus has an amazing ability to craft unique and wonderful stories from across many different genres, and while my favorites from the author land more in the horror genre, I have not read a story by Daniel that I have not loved. If I have found to like all the books I have read by an author, I should probably listen to said author when they mention how much they love a certain book they have penned. So, I decided one fateful day to open up the first volume of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch and was not disappointed.
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch is a story with so many stories. It almost feels as such that Kraus had a craving to tell stories in many different locations over many different times and decided that Zebulon would endure these tales. There is traveling roadshows, moonshining, war, Hollywood, and so much more packed into this book and while you might think that make sense with the large page count, it still surprised me with how much Kraus was able to squeeze into this novel.
Told in chronological order from the younger years of Zebulon, his death, and his journey through time. Zebulon tells the story of America and beyond through the lens of a selfish and foolish man stuck in a undead body of a seventeen-year-old. While some decades are slower moving than others, the story grips you on every page. Kraus’s storytelling is captivating and while we know what happens in the course of history, its compelling to find out how Zebulon fits into it and what happens as he continues to outlive (in a sense) those around him.
With longer books in the past, I have been eagerly awaiting the end and ready to move onto the next book. However, The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch is a sprawling and entertaining novel that I was not ready to put down, but now I excited to dive into The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume Two: Empire Decayed.
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume One is available at bookstores everywhere from Simon & Schuster. The audiobook, narrated by Kirby Heyborne, is available via Libro.fm!
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume Two: Empire Decayed
When planning my reading of The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, I felt I was going to need a few weeks between reading Volume One and Volume Two, but after completing the first book I had to jump quickly into the second. Not only is the writing by Daniel Kraus fantastic, I needed to know how and what shenanigans Zebulon Finch was going to get into over the next many years.
Zebulon Finch has faced more violence, lust, and heartbreak than any other seventeen-year-old in history. But nothing can prepare him for what is coming next.
Half a century has passed since Zebulon Finch was gunned down and then inexplicably resurrected to experience a second life. Picking up his tale where he left off, Zebulon heads to Nazi Germany on a top-secret mission. From there he escapes to the shiny new world of the suburbs—a tidy neighborhood hiding dark secrets. He will exchange the pains of this world for what he believes will be peace among the stars. He will march for social change all the way to Woodstock, go raving mad in the desert, and finally exit from humanity the only way he knows how. We first met Zebulon sealed in a tomb beneath the World Trade Center—might he yet crawl from the rubble to discover a different America?
Now, at the ripe old age of 40 I know what happens for the most part over the course of our history on this planet. However, fitting all important moments into a story would be a difficult challenge. So, what I was mostly intrigued by was how Kraus would squeeze in some of the more iconic moments in time and which ones he would choose to have Finch’s storyline intertwine.
Every new segment of time truly surprised me, from Nazi Germany to Woodstock and everything in-between, it was a great mystery on where Zebulon would stumble into and how he would ultimately shape the future.
It would be fitting for a fictional tale about the undead to have them greatly change the course of history by killing Hitler or inventing a new gadget, but Kraus wonderfully installs Finch into historic moments but with the feeling he could’ve really been there. That he had an impact on the outcome of these events but never made it to the history books. It truly made you want to keep reading.
The events and timeline are highlights of these books, it’s the growth of Zebulon Finch that had my attention the most. How would this forever 17-year-old body hold up to so many years of abuse both physically and mentally. While I don’t look forward to the day I move on, I do however know that I would not want to live forever, especially after finishing these books.
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume Two is a fantastic ending to the story put forward by Daniel Kraus. The amount of varying stories that is feature in these books is simply amazing. It’s almost 10-15 different books based around Zebulon Finch and the history of our world, but in one fluid story. It’s fantastic adventure and I am all the better for reading it.
The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume Two is available at bookstores everywhere from Simon & Schuster. The audiobook, narrated by Kirby Heyborne, is available via Libro.fm!
