Alive in Necropolis » (Reprint)

Doug Dorst teaches creative writing at St. Edward's University. His work has appeared in McSweeney's, Ploughshares, Epoch, and other journals, as well as in the anthology Politically Inspired. He is also a former Jeopardy champion.

A "dark and funny debut"(Seattle-Times) about a young police officer struggling to maintain a sense of reality in a town where the dead outnumber the living.

Colma, California, the "cemetery city" serving San Francisco, is the resting place of the likes of Joe DiMaggio, Wyatt Earp, and William Randolph Hearst. It is also the home of Michael Mercer, a by-the-book rookie cop struggling to settle comfortably into adult life. Instead, he becomes obsessed with the mysterious fate of his predecessor, Sergeant Wes Featherstone, who spent his last years policing the dead as well as the living. As Mercer attempts to navigate the drama of his own daily life, his own grip on reality starts to slip-either that, or Colma's more famous residents are not resting in peace as they should be.

The New York Times - Mark Costello

The left brain of this novel, the plotty, structured part, is a fine, familiar branch of California noir. Like Dashiell Hammett, Dorst conveys a hard-bitten love of the physical San Francisco, the fog-swallowed town, the sun after rain, the mineshaft drops in temperature. Scenes are rooted in surroundings and the weather. The fiction seems to possess, and be possessed by, its beloved Bay…The ghosts are a prime pleasure here. The prose picks up a quickness in their presence. They are figures out of newsreels, colorful, iconic.