Amazon named this book best of the month of its publication. Reviews follow:
âIn the same way Buffy the Vampire Slayer mixed high school and bloodsuckers, Doug Dorst combines cops and ghosts in his Alive in Necropolis. The result is a haunted variation on Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series ⦠Imaginative and accomplished ⦠Pitch-perfect.â
âUSA Today
"[A] daring and bighearted first novel...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...Awareness is the high prize of the novel."
âThe New York Times Book Review
"Doug Dorst's smart and accessibly unconventional first novel, Alive in Necropolis,...is not quite a horror story, nor exactly a mystery, nor just a hard-boiled police procedural, but an adult coming-of-age saga that pulls with energy and imagination from these various genres...[Dorst] us[es] a limited third-person narrative shot through with streaks of black humor to vivid, insightful effect."
âIn the same way Buffy the Vampire Slayer mixed high school and bloodsuckers, Doug Dorst combines cops and ghosts in his Alive in Necropolis. The result is a haunted variation on Ed McBain's 87th Precinct series ⦠Imaginative and accomplished ⦠Pitch-perfect.â
âUSA Today
"[A] daring and bighearted first novel...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...Awareness is the high prize of the novel."
âThe New York Times Book Review
"Doug Dorst's smart and accessibly unconventional first novel, Alive in Necropolis,...is not quite a horror story, nor exactly a mystery, nor just a hard-boiled police procedural, but an adult coming-of-age saga that pulls with energy and imagination from these various genres...[Dorst] us[es] a limited third-person narrative shot through with streaks of black humor to vivid, insightful effect."
