The Dead I Know

The Dead I Know (2011), a young adult novel by Australian author Scot Gardner, tells the story of a young man who confronts the grief from his past after getting a job at a funeral parlor. According to Kirkus Reviews, The Dead I Know is "simply told and powerfully moving."

Aaron Rowe is a young man described as "tall, dark, and handsome...with an emphasis on dark." At the beginning of the novel, he gets a job at a funeral parlor working for John Barton. A kindly father figure to Aaron, throughout the novel, Barton is coping with the untimely death of his son. His somewhat surprising way of coping with death is to surround himself with it constantly through his work as a funeral director. Thus, he is "always dark" on the outside but "happy underneath."

For Aaron, work at the funeral home largely serves as a distraction from his terrifying and traumatizing home life. Almost every night, he suffers bizarre and fearsome nightmares about death, in between severe bouts of sleepwalking after which he wakes up in unfamiliar places far from home. Meanwhile, he must care for his grandmother, Mam who suffers from ever-worsening dementia. Despite her increasingly bad condition, Aaron refuses to send her to a nursing home, even though deep down he knows he can no longer provide the quality of care she needs by himself. Doing so, however, would make him even lonelier than he already is.



While Aaron tells himself that dealing with death and grieving families all day is a welcome distraction from his morbid fears, his nightmares and sleepwalking appear to be getting worse. As matters worsen on every front, he even considers checking himself into a mental institution where perhaps they could inflict some kind of drug-induced catatonia on him. That, at least, would be preferable to the nightmares and the waking up in compromising places.

Aaron's existential crisis worsens when confronted by the decomposing body of Amanda Creen, a beautiful young girl who was murdered. The reader also learns that Aaron may be suffering from insanity inherited from his father, who reportedly lost his mind. Later, Aaron and Barton are charged with recovering the remains of a motorcycle rider who was torn apart on the highway. This grisly task infects Aaron's brain in the form of a new nightmare in which the police want him to put a body back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

Over time, Aaron slowly learns to let other people in. He makes friends with a neighbor named Westy. He also picks up new skills both at the funeral home and away from it. For example, Barton teaches Aaron to drive, something his father could not do. By the end of the novel, the reader finally learns the source of Aaron's repressed grief and tortured mental state. As a small child, he witnessed his father murder his mother. Aaron relives this shocking tragedy in a dream sequence toward the end of the book. During that dream, he sleepwalks toward the edge of a cliff; it is not entirely clear whether he is consciously aware of this suicide or not. Perhaps the answer is something in between. In any case, he is saved by a group of paramedics who grab him before he descends to his death, echoing when police came in to save his life from his murderous father who may have also intended to kill Aaron as well.



At the end of the book, after Aaron faces his buried trauma and grief, the funeral home gets a call about a small child who has died after falling into a water tank and drowning. The boy is around the same age that Aaron was when his mother was murdered. Aaron sees himself in the boy, the implicit suggestion being Aaron essentially died on the day he witnessed that horrifying act of violence against his mother. On the other hand, perhaps it suggests that was the day Aaron's childhood or innocence died. Alternatively, a third option is that it is the vision of the boy struggling to keep his head above water in the tank that most reminds Aaron of himself. "I'm the drowning boy," Aaron says. "I've been drowning for years."

The Dead I Know is a startlingly intense book about overcoming grief, cruelly but honestly, suggesting that some traumas can never be fully overcome.