Happily Never Afterlife

Waking up dead was not on 86-year-old Minerva Mae Carmine's bingo card. After a routine colonoscopy sends Mae into the bureaucratic world of the Afterlife, she wakes up young, disoriented, and wants nothing more than to be reunited with her beloved husband, Harold. She insists Harold must be waiting for her - after all, they were married for 54 years. There's just one problem.

Harold isn't her soulmate.

After punching an orderly in the face and being taken into the counselor's office, Mae is introduced to her assigned soulmate - a shaggy-haired jackass named Mr. Blakely she has never met before!

Insisting there has been an egregious clerical error, Mae sets out to find her husband and make things right. She bolts into the Afterlife, tethered by a red band that will electroshock her and Mr. Blakely if they get too far away from each other, and enlists Mr. Blakely's help in finding Harold.

But Mae gets more than she bargained for when Mr. Blakely insists they take the long way 'round through eternity. On the long stretches of road between towns and memories, Mae and Mr. Blakely clash over everything: breakfast foods, cleanliness, and how to live in the Afterlife. He's a war-toughened optimist with a broken past. She's a sharp-tongued realist learning to make room for adventure. When truths are revealed, Mae must choose whether to keep holding on to the life she knew or risk loving again.

This is a road-trip romcom with teeth: demons, sinkholes, a dog worth dying for, and an Afterlife that runs on paperwork. Mae's question is simple and savage: Who will she be if she lets go of Harold? The answer arrives messy, funny, and impossible to forget.