{"id":7314,"date":"2026-09-17T12:03:39","date_gmt":"2026-09-17T12:03:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7314"},"modified":"2026-09-17T12:03:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-17T12:03:39","slug":"grim-tidings-by-b-k-borison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=7314","title":{"rendered":"Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison"},"content":{"rendered":"

She has been dead for roughly a hundred years, and she still drinks her water. She still has a doughnut for breakfast and the occasional cigarette after dinner, even though her body requires none of it. And she holds on to these small habits deliberately, because they are the last human things she has left, and because a colleague keeps pointing out that dead people do not need to stay hydrated. He is technically correct. She keeps drinking the water anyway. Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> spends four hundred pages on that instinct, and a reading group will spend most of an evening on what it means.<\/p>\n

The Afterlife Has a Water Cooler<\/h2>\n

The premise is the funniest thing here and the most useful.<\/p>\n

Darcy Moore was twenty-seven in the spring of 1918 when the illness that had followed her since girlhood finally finished its work. She woke up employed. What waits on the far side, in Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong>, is not a judgment seat but an organisation with offices, and the offices have politics. Poltergeists are tethered to whatever building they haunt and cannot get a supervisor to answer a memo. An intake clerk presides over filing cabinets that climb to a ceiling nobody has seen, and turns away a soul because he is running late. Staff are, in Darcy\u2019s phrase, immortal pencil pushers in indentured servitude, and nobody has fixed the drinking fountain.<\/p>\n

The Reapers, management believes, are drawn from whichever souls arrive carrying the most shadow. Darcy did not get a say. She was sorted, and has spent a century being treated like contagion by every other office in the building.<\/p>\n

Across the corridor sit the Guardians, who are adored. Gabriel has been one for well over two thousand years. He tends a bar in a small Maryland port town, he has a tattoo for every life he has shaped, and he carries two scars across his chest for the two souls he failed to keep. A third failure costs him his wings. Then a Reaper walks into his bar.<\/p>\n

What B.K. Borison Is Actually Writing About<\/h2>\n

Underneath the jokes is a serious argument, and it is the reason to put this on a list.<\/p>\n

The oldest version of this figure, the psychopomp<\/a> who escorts the dead from one place to the next, is usually written as neutral machinery. Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> is interested instead in the toll. Darcy describes every life she has collected as a stone laid on her heart. She cannot offer comfort and she cannot offer explanation; she can only be the last face someone sees, and then carry them, and then do it again tomorrow. She has come to believe she is the cause of what she witnesses.<\/p>\n

Gabriel believes the opposite about himself with equal conviction, and it is destroying him at the same rate. He thinks his job is to prevent every death, and that failing even once is unforgivable. Neither position survives contact with the other.<\/p>\n

Borison\u2019s closing note explains where this comes from. Her husband works in palliative medicine. She writes about watching him grieve people he barely had time to meet, and about the thing he keeps returning to: that being with someone at the end is a privilege rather than a defeat. A group will want to talk about whether the novel earns that reframing or simply asserts it.<\/p>\n

The Quietest Thing B.K. Borison Does<\/h2>\n

The best strand of Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> is not the romance. It belongs to a florist in his late seventies, a man named Frank who turns up at the bar three evenings a week and works his way through a tub of maraschino cherries nobody sold him.<\/p>\n

He is kind, and nosy, and grieving in a way that goes unnamed for a very long time. There are three bins of peonies on his wall that he handles one bloom at a time and never sells. There is a wife he will not discuss. When the novel finally says what he is, it is not a twist so much as a door opening onto something that was standing there the whole time, and it reframes everything Darcy believes about herself.<\/p>\n

Groups should go in cold on this one. It is the finest writing in the book and it deserves to arrive unspoiled.<\/p>\n

Where B.K. Borison Softens the Blow<\/h2>\n

The last act is where it gives way.<\/p>\n

Consequences evaporate.<\/strong> The punishment Gabriel has dreaded for two millennia turns out to be something else entirely and costs him nothing. It is generous. It also dismantles the tension the novel spent four hundred pages building.
\nThe villain is defused on arrival.<\/strong> The head of the Reapers is invoked for two hundred pages as an ancient terror and then appears in sunglasses, eating a lollipop, complaining about a paperwork backlog. He is wonderful company and no threat whatsoever.
\nA great deal is explained rather than dramatised.<\/strong> A secondary character turns up late with a folder and talks the reader through the architecture of the book while someone signs forms.
\nThe antagonism ends early.<\/strong> The enemies phase lasts about seventy pages. What follows is longing, which is lovely, and not the same thing.<\/p>\n

Against that, the comic supporting cast in Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> is superb, the sex scenes are explicit and unusually careful about consent, and there is an undead German shepherd called Tater Tot who alone justifies the cover price.<\/p>\n

Questions Worth Arguing About<\/h2>\n

Start with the list. In her last months of illness Darcy set down every ordinary thing she intended to do the moment she got well, and the paper has travelled with her ever since. Swim at sunset. Adopt a pet. Learn to change a tyre. Ask the group what is actually on that piece of paper, and whether a person who spends a century unable to complete it is grieving her life or refusing to admit it ended.<\/p>\n

Then ask about Gabriel\u2019s arithmetic, which Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> treats as the mirror image of Darcy\u2019s. He has helped thousands and failed twice, and he treats the two as the only entries that count. Ask whether anyone at the table keeps books that way about their own work, and what it would take to close them.<\/p>\n

Finally, ask the question the novel is built on. Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> argues that arriving at the end of a life can be an act of mercy rather than a theft. Ask whether the group accepts that, and whether it changes when the person dying is young, or unwilling, or has small children. Ask whether the book is brave enough to test its own thesis at the hardest edge, and what it might have looked like if it had.<\/p>\n

Groups who want more should start with Good Spirits<\/a>, the first book set in this department and a gentler way in. If I Stopped Haunting You<\/a> by Colby Wilkens suits a group that wants an actual haunting and two people who cannot stand each other. First-Time Caller<\/a> shows what this author does with no magic at all. And Always You and Me<\/a> by Dani Atkins is the choice for a group that wants the grief without the jokes.<\/p>\n

What It Leaves Behind<\/h2>\n

The last image belongs to a folded piece of paper. Darcy wrote it in a hospital bed in 1918, when she was young and frightened and certain she would get out. She has carried it through every assignment since, worn soft at the creases, and she has never shown it to a living soul. One of the entries reads bake a pie<\/em>, with an asterisk beneath it specifying that it should be a good one.<\/p>\n

That asterisk is what stays. Grim Tidings by B.K. Borison<\/strong> is about a woman who is not asking for a miracle or a resurrection, only for a Tuesday: a burnt crust, a cold cup of coffee, a dog on the end of the bed. The plot loses its nerve in the final chapters and hands everybody more than they bargained for. The list does not. A reading group will find rather more to say about that scrap of paper than about the ending, which is a compliment, and also the reason to choose it.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

She has been dead for roughly a hundred years, and she still drinks her water. She still has a doughnut for breakfast and the occasional cigarette after dinner, even though her body requires none of it. And she holds on to these small habits deliberately, because they are the last human things she has left, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7314"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}