The Last Time I Died
Christian Franco is truly embracing the despair of divorce, doing nothing to slow the implosion of his career, friendships, and relationships. He camps out at bars and picks fights, finding that getting his ass kicked allows him his only meditative moments, something he explores with sardonic zeal.
Nine years of his childhood are entirely repressed, a consequence of his father killing his mother when Christian was eight. But a single clear memory resurfaces when Christian is beaten to death in a bar brawl: a memory of his stoop in Brooklyn, his father in the back of a cop car, and his mother being wheeled away on a gurney. He is resuscitated, and he craves more memories.
What follows is Christian's increasingly desperate means to kill himself and be revived, slowly piecing together snapshots from his childhood to understand how this rediscovered self-knowledge could make his wife come back. Alternating between heartbreaking memories of a happier time, Christian revels in the underbelly of New York City in a spectacular downward spiral.
Praise for The Last Time I Died
"THE LAST TIME I DIED is a maelstrom of brilliant prose—dark, delectable, devastating, and utterly, utterly compelling. If this is Joe Nelms’ debut, watch out, world. Chuck Palahniuk fans will love this book."
–Sara Gruen, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of Water For Elephants
Christian Franco knows there's something wrong with his memory. That's what happens when your dad murdered your mom, and you spend years bouncing around the foster-care system. Nine years of repressed childhood memories have to come back eventually, right? The problem is, Christian is only able to access old memories when he's on the verge of consciousness. Alternately thrilled and horrified by his new memories, he turns to ever more drastic measures to leave his fully conscious mind behind. From picking bar fights to injecting experimental drugs, Christian finds that his willingness to kill himself ultimately allows him to fully understand his troubled childhood. Nelms has created a thrill ride in this fast-paced story focused on the conflict between the pain of repression and the pain of knowledge. Fans of the TV show Dexter, the film Memento, and the novels of DBC Pierre will appreciate the brutal honesty of Christian's narration, spliced with flashbacks to happier times and occasional observations from an omniscient third party. One of the most compelling first novels in recent memory, The Last Time I Died is chilling, cinematic, and unapologetically brash, a heady mixture of all-consuming desire and mortality.
–Stephanie Turza, Booklist
"Joe Nelms' masterful debut is a heat-seeking missile headed straight for your gut, and, be warned, it does not miss its mark. THE LAST TIME I DIED asks one simple question: how far would you go to recover your lost childhood, to get back to that state of grace before what happened happened, before you set out to lay waste to your own life and the lives around you, of those you love the most? The harrowing answer is the narrative of this wonderfully written book --- to the doors of death and beyond, until there's nothing left to lose and only one thing to gain. The White. Like a junkie, once you pick up this book, you do not put it down until all the dope is gone."
–Robert Goolrick, #1 NY Times Bestselling Author of A Reliable Wife and Heading Out To Wonderful
"In his riveting, searing debut, Joe Nelms forces his main character, Christian Franco, through a self-imposed, bone-crunching, wince-inducing wringer that is so utterly compelling, we cannot stop watching. Funny, disturbing, and full of sharp elbows, The Last Time I died is ultimately a story of redemption, and Nelms delivers a powerful, punishing, and, amazingly enough, hopeful novel."
–Garth Stein, NY Times Bestselling Author of The Art Of Racing In The Rain
"From page one this novel thrust you into the fraught mind of a man whose life was ruined before it even began, a nobody trapped inside his own lethal obsessions, and the effect is so gripping, so tragic and chilling, that you wouldn't escape even if you could. With stark searing prose and keen insights, Joe Nelms will make you feel what it's like to dive headfirst into disintegration just to discover who you truly are and finally get some peace. The story will tattoo itself to your psyche. You'll be glad and grateful."
–Jeff Backhaus, author of The Rental Sister
"Christian Franco, the creative and charismatic protagonist of Nelms’s debut novel, is like an indefatigable class clown, darkly funny and constantly stirring the pot. But underneath the arch exterior, he’s a mess: self-destructive at the law firm where he works and tormented in the aftermath of a painful divorce, he suffers also under the burden of a traumatic childhood that decades of therapy have done little to ameliorate. Every night brings a new round of hard drinking. The reader first encounters Christian after a suicide attempt (and not his first). He is a maximally unreliable first-person narrator, his situation exacerbated by his innate sense of mischief and his contrary nature. The story is told in short, punchy chapters, very much following the erratic path of Christian’s psyche. Often, the text consists of a parade of vivid images, coming at the reader in a vertical series like free verse: “Waiting in line for my coffee. Sitting on hold. Biking by the river. Waking up in a stranger’s bed.” Flashbacks make up a large portion of the story, filling in the puzzle pieces of Christian’s past by tantalizing increments. The ultimate reveals may veer into the melodramatic, but Christian is a relatable modern man and Nelms’s crackling prose moves like lightning."
–Publishers Weekly
Nelms debuts with a dark psychological drama tracing Christian Franco’s spiral into madness.
Christian’s the son of a New York cop and a homemaker, strictly middle-class borough folk. Then Christian’s father kills his mother. Despite sloppy foster care and sexual abuse, Christian won't be denied, and so it’s law school honors and the fast track at a prestigious law firm. There’s money, major partner mentoring, and then marriage to beautiful, irresistible Lisa. Life’s perfect, except that Christian’s a tightened-down pressure cooker fueled by rage and suppressed memories of his mother’s murder. Lisa leaves. Christian self-medicates with alcohol and drugs, neglects work, and instigates fights: "There was nothing like a good beat down to take the edge off." Soon, he’s out of second chances, fired after the night he’s beaten almost to death and narrowly revived. Unconscious, Christian experienced what he calls "The White...bright and clean and perfect...yet soothing and comfortable," with flashes of suppressed childhood traumas on display. After Christian awakens, he sketches memories in manic episodes—dozens of drawings. Christian’s rage-fueled quest to know the truth of his childhood comes in strobe-light snapshot chapters, flashes of manic action much like Chuck Palahniuk’s transgressional narratives. Christian becomes obsessed with dying, confronting "The White" and then being revived again. Christian soon meets Dr. Cordoba, a defrocked physician/researcher working part-time treating injured fighting dogs. Christian persuades her to kill and then revive him, which she does in her hidden laboratory, but the cost she exacts is demented. Nelms writes in first person, with sardonic, distanced second-person chapters scattered about, with an intensity and focus that will keep the reader wondering. Christian—"I am an amorphous id in jeans and a tee-shirt moving quickly through structures of glass and marble with a single focus"—isn’t a sympathetic character, but he’s the engine of the demented narrative.
–Kirkus Reviews
Occasionally a book comes along that is so fresh and so different it just stands out. THE LAST TIME I DIED (Tyrus) is one of those books. Christian Franco is a messed up guy dealing with divorce and all other parts of his life deteriorating. His answer is to basically get drunk, get in fights, and get his ass kicked. One of these beatings goes a bit too far and he dies. While dying he has visions of a childhood memory involving his Father killing his Mother. In order to get more of this, after he is revived he tries to repeat the process. Strange and wonderful at the same time this book will leave you with a not unpleasant aftertaste that lingers like a nice meal.
–CrimeSpree Magazine
The Wednesday Review: Joe Nelms’ The Last Time I Died
By Amanda
The Wednesday Review is my pick for the book you absolutely, positively have to read this month. They run the gamut from literary fiction to romance, but they all have something in common: beautiful language and a story that sinks its claws in and won’t let go.
Christian’s head is not a nice place to be.
It is the opposite of nice. It’s dark and supremely fucked up. I almost feel like that’s a mild description for Christian Franco’s brain. Dark and supremely fucked up.
There’s something about The Last Time I Died that is excruciating to read, and yet, I couldn’t stop reading. Not until my stomach clenched one too many times and I had to put it down and pick up something else, something fluffy and mind-numbing. It’s that kind of book. It’s Hurricane Katrina footage: you keep watching, and watching, your disgust and disbelief growing with every second, but it’s not until day three of the coverage do you finally turn the TV off, and by that point your brain has been so saturated with the mess you’ll never forget it.
Christian’s been trying to deal with the fallout of his divorce, but he can’t bring himself to care about anything. He’s on the verge of losing his job, he’s already lost most, if not all, of his friends, and has generally made himself into an incredibly unlikeable person. That was one of my first thoughts about him – he’s hard to sympathize with. Nearly impossible, really. He goes out looking for trouble because all of his previous attempts at death have failed, and he’s made more than a few. But one attempt lands him in The White, a place of memory, and as they go sailing past, he finds one he’s repressed since he was eight. Desperate for more, he attempts riskier and riskier near-death experiences, all with the hope of ending up in The White, in the flood of memories.
I can’t remember the last time I had such a physical reaction to a book. It falls in that same category that Important Movies fall into, where you call it a film and it’s deep and powerful and gut-wrenching. Died is certainly gut-wrenching. Powerful, yes. Deep, in its way. It’s the perfect example of how utterly screwed the system can be. You have to wonder if the social workers hadn’t been so overworked, would they have paid more attention to how Christian was coping with the death of his mother? If there was more funding for therapy, would he have gotten the help he clearly needed? Because there is something fundamentally and irreparably broken in him.
The Last Time I Died lands in that category because you should read it, like you should read Eli Weisel’s Night or Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave, like you should watch Schindler’s List and Hotel Rwanda. The twisted way you come to care about Christian, when no one else does, makes you want to shake those few people around him who still see him and slap them into noticing him. They are calmly sitting by, watching the show he’s putting on. You should read it, and once you do, you won’t want to read it again because it’s that kind of book, the one you read and tell everyone else to but can’t stomach the thought of re-reading it. You want Christian to succeed, to uncover those missing pieces of himself, because there’s that faint hope that by doing so he’ll heal.
I’m not sure it’s possible for him to heal. I think he may remain a shell of a human, the poster boy for how we fail as humans when we wait for someone else to do the right thing.