Second Lives by P D. Cacek

When four patients spontaneously regain consciousness after being declared dead, their loved ones are ecstatic and words like "miracle" and "miraculous" begin to float around the hospital. But the jubilation is short lived when the patients neither recognize their families nor answer to their names. Each one vehemently claims to be someone else, someone who lived, and died, in the past. When it's suggested that all four are suffering from fugue states, one of the doctors says that he recognizes a name and verifies he not only knew the girl but was there when she died in 1992. It soon becomes obvious that the bodies of the four patients are now inhabited by the souls of people long dead. A frightened little boy killed in 1956 cries out for his mother from the body of an 81 year old Alzheimer's patient, the soul of a spinster killed in a Suffragette rally wakes in the body of a new mother; an orthodox Jew, murdered in 1922, opens the eyes of a gay suicide and a teenage girl wakes to discover she's now in the body of a 45 year old woman. The hospital psychiatrist, after talking with them, dubs the four "The Travelers" and believes they are proof of the transmigration of souls. They are more than just lost souls, he tells the grieving families, they are completely alone and terrified, displaced into bodies that aren't their own and trapped in a world they can't understand. If they are to survive they'll need help and to this end the doctor asks the families to make a supreme sacrifice and do just that: to help these strangers assimilate into society and their new lives. To care for a complete stranger who looks like the loved one they just lost is a hard thing to ask of people. The families have the right to say no, they are under no legal or moral obligation to help; but they do. Spearheaded by the elderly woman whose husband's body now holds the soul of a frightened child, but still with reservations and not a little anger, they finally agree to accept the strangers wearing their loved ones bodies, and will do everything they can to help "The Travelers" make as smooth and gentle a transition into their new lives as possible.

 

This novel is a spellbinding and original exploration of reincarnation in which lives that were cut short return from the dead, not as newborns and not with new lives, but in the bodies of the recently deceased. Imagine losing a loved one, but not being able to lay them to rest because a stranger now inhabits their body. Imagine having lost a loved one years ago but finding out they are now alive in a body that you don't recognize. Now imagine being that person, perhaps a child that was run down in the street waking up in the body of an elderly dying man. This is the wondrous concept brought to life by P.D. Casek.

5 out of 5 stars.

 

I received an advance copy for review.

 

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About the author

Occasionally credited as Patricia D. Cacek.

Patricia Diana Joy Anne Cacek (December 22, 1951, Hollywood, California) is an American author, mostly of horror novels. She graduated with a B.A in Creative Writing from California State University, Long Beach in 1975.