Book Review: Homecoming

Title: Homecoming 

Author: Frank Winter

Date: 2021

Publisher: Frank Winter

ISBN: 978-1-7376232-1-2

Length: 572 pages

Quote: "Joe wanted to vent his rage at someone from the defensive line."

Joe behaves himself during the homecoming game--he doesn't want to be thrown off the team--but then, well, he doesn't. But that's only part of the fictional homecoming adventure that will involve three hundred students...

Will you like this book enough to read all 572 pages of it?  Possibly. It may help if you're better prepared than I was. I thought it was going to be a parody, intentional or not, of a horror cliche: Students are trapped in the school building together, and one of them is an evil, demonic murderer. That plot element is used, but Homecoming is not the traditional teen slasher story. 

It is, in fact, a fictional fleshing out of one of several traditional Christian understandings of death and the afterlife. As with many things in Christianity, although there's general agreement that Jesus offered us the hope of resurrection in a better kind of life, there are different ideas about how that might work. Part of the plot of Homecoming is that the characters are trying to work out just how the afterlife does work. 

For more than half of the the book they're all dead, sort of. They've all been killed when the building blew up like a bomb. Joe, the quarterback whom we meet first, becomes the leader of a faction of walking-dead students whose goal is to find out how and why it blew up, while Andrei, the new boy at school, becomes the leader of a faction whose goal is to find out why they're all still walking and talking and whether there's a way out of the strangely unaltered school building. The early chapters, in which we meet the characters alive, foreshadow the drama they'll get into in limbo.

Some readers may think that "limbo" means a dance or game in which people compete to show their "limberness" by passing under a stick or rope. There's that too, but in some Christian traditions there's a serious belief in Limbo as the shallowest, least horrible level of Dante's Inferno, where the unbaptized babies and heathens go, not to be tormented but just to drift about forever. This belief is not in the Bible; it was constructed by medieval logic. Many Christians reject the idea of Limbo as a theological concept. 

For the purposes of this story, however, Limbo is where the homecoming party attendees and their two chaperones find themselves when they wake up after the explosion. Their reflections in mirrors make some of them scream and faint: though they see each other normally, in mirrors they see themselves and each other as crushed, burned bodies. When cut they feel pain, but they don't bleed; dust trickles out of them and gradually, magnetically, finds its way back into them. Most of the students think this must be Hell, because they want terribly to go home. But of course, as at any large school, there are those who don't have much of a home to go to. 

Without spoiling the ending I do need to warn people to whom it may matter that, although nobody preaches the Gospel in detail, Christian prayers seem to be necessary to allow those who've confessed all of their major sins to escape from Limbo; and premarital sex, which some couples manage to do even in Limbo, is not counted as a major sin. 

There are different views, also, on whether this sort of thing is Christian Heresy, or merely Christian Speculative Fiction. Or, even if you classify it as heresy, is it "worse" than Left Behind or, for that matter, Perelandra, or Dante's original Divine Comedy? This web site will not presume to judge.