My thoughts on The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried

  

I am once again on my anti hardback agenda. Yes, they look pretty, but they’re so unnecessarily chunky, and I bring it up because my copy of The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried by Shaun David Hutchinson is indeed a hardback. I’ve read We Are the Ants by Hutchinson before, and I vaguely remember enjoying it, so I didn’t see why I wouldn’t enjoy this one too.

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So, the old Clever Blurb Pun That I Didn’t Think Of told me that Dino doesn’t mind spending time with the dead since his parents own a funeral home. He is, however, not used to them talking back. His ex-best friend, July, dies and comes back to life. But then it says that July isn’t quite dead or alive. Then, they have to figure out what’s happening and why their friendship ended so badly. And finally, the last bit is just about understanding themselves, each other and life. From that, it gave me that, in a way, this was going to be a coming of age story almost, which wasn’t exactly something I expected from something involving dead people.

The first chapter introduces us to Dino and his boyfriend, Rafi. Rafi invites him to a party as they’re cleaning up a beach, and Dino says that he’ll consider going, but he has to attend July’s funeral the next day, and when he gets home, we get the vibe that his parents are hinting that they want him to take over the funeral home they run – but he’s very much in the not knowing what he’s doing with his life era. And then by the end of chapter three, Dino has just finished preparing July’s make-up for her funeral, she wakes up and screams – girlboss. So, the gig from the blurb all pretty much happens within these three chapters.

Then we switch POVs, to the newly risen July, which I was actually quite happy about, because sure, we have one character, a miserable queer boy, but he could only be so interesting when there’s also a resurrected girl in the story. Like, I immediately wanted to know what was going on in her head, and I’m glad that we got to see it.

Now, my immediate thought was that she was going to re-die by the end of the story. Like, she came back to life, it was mentioned that she didn’t even have a heartbeat. I kind of just assumed that she was going to leave at the end – a la He’s Coming to Me. For some minor spoilers as the book goes on, she does continue to decompose – since she’s a corpse, technically. And she does suggest that the two of them “need to end this”, although there’s no specification on what “it” is. But given that she literally was a dead body, I, again, assumed that she wasn’t going to make it to the end of the book, or at least, in perfect condition. Spoilers end here.

We find out pretty soon after, even before the two of them start trying to figure out what in the h-e-double-fuck is going on with July, why the two of them stopped being friends. From July’s perspective, Dino started dating Rafi and then basically dropped July. And on one hand, this is what happened, but it happened after July called Rafi Dino’s girlfriend, as a joke, but we find out here that Rafi is actually trans. So it was very much one of those, sharp breath in oh shit, unfortunate jokes that ended up being offensive because July didn’t know otherwise. She does, thankfully, almost immediately apologise for it. So, while I did have an immediate feeling that July was in fact a transphobic garbage pile, she didn’t mean to be a transphobic garbage pile, it was an accident.

They then see someone get hit by a car, whose neck breaks, but then the paramedic tells Dino that people have not been dying all night. Like, people who should be dead aren’t. And bitch! Reading that line was the one that flipped the switch in my brain that made me think, “Okay, we’re into this whore now.” Like, I was fully sold on the book. Before that line I was just in the, “Oh, it’s going to be a story where she’s just going to come back to life, the two of them will fix their friendship and then she'll re-die once they’re good.” But no, there’s actually something more going on in this book.

One critique I have is that there were moments throughout the book where Hutchinson’s word choice was fancier than it needed to be. There were a couple of times where I had to stop and fully Google what a word meant. And this was a YA book that was less than 300 pages, so I think Hutchinson could have gotten away with using simpler language and gotten the same messages across.

It was the kind of story that made you realise that both Dino and July had their issues, like they didn’t always talk to each other, or tell each other the truth. Like, you know how in TV shows, miscommunication, or lack of communication, often causes problems with characters? Dino and July seemed very much like that. They both thought what they thought about situations they were in, or put each other in, and, for some reason, never really talked to each other about it – until July died. Like they both sucked in the sense that they were both teenagers who obviously had a lot to learn about life and the world.

The second half of the book definitely had a different vibe to the first. You know how a lot of books go for the slow build up to the big explosion of action? This book almost felt like the opposite. This is going to be an odd analogy, but it’s how it works in my brain. The first half of the book worked like debris in a whirlpool. It started off as a lot of things swirling around, aching to be brought together, and then as the story went on, the debris was all drawn to the centre of the whirlpool where it all reconnected into one mass, wherein then the whirlpool dissipated and let the newly built mass off into the ocean to reach wherever its destination may be. To make it make sense without the analogy, everything made sense in the end.

So, that's it. They were my thoughts on this... Go read the book, it slapped, and is in contention for my book of the year.

Okay, bye!