Elaine Showalter, June 2000

In How the Dead Live, Self has transformed one part of this premise into a full-length account of necropolitan London. In his satiric geography, the young dead – the “morbidly mobile” – go to find work in the States or the Gulf, but the older dead simply live on either north of the river in Dulston or south of the river in Dulburb, their placements assigned by the Deatheaucracy Office. Their mornings are busy with the Full Dead breakfast and their evenings filled with the 12-step meetings of PD (Personally Dead). Freddy Ayer, Ronny Laing and Laurence Olivier have Dulston flats; almost all the dead smoke, drink, and sleep around, and all they need to keep up with the urban deathstyle of the rich and famous is Goodbye! magazine.   More...

Adam Mars-Jones, June 2000

“Beneath the headlines, Self’s style is no less contorted, without even a second-hand immediacy: ‘Fleet feet fled through flesh’ runs one sentence. There’s a fatal blurring even in relatively straightforward descriptions: ‘He was bald save for a horseshoe of brownish furze, wore a white T-shirt, the trousers from a long-since dismembered suit, and a scowling mien on his crushed, Gladstone face.’ Is wearing a scowling mien on your face really any different from scowling? And hasn’t the dictionary meaning of ‘furze’ – a plant with yellow flowers and thick, green spines, a synonym for gorse – been supplanted by irrelevant associations, as if it was a portmanteau word meaning furry fuzz or fuzzy fur?   More...

The Guardian’s condensed send-up of How The Dead Live’s plotline.

The condensed version of the condensed version is particularly good:
“Reworking of the fucking Tibetan Book of the Dead in which Lily Bloom lives, dies and finds some form of fucking redemption”