kind of real.

Luisa Perkins’ novel, Dispirited, is quite riveting and rather engaging as it navigates alternate realities/realms of existence, death and limbo, and ownership of our bodies. While there have been novels, TV shows, and movies that depict alternate realities and realms of existence, not many quite make it so real, so in-your-face, they’re-walking-among-us kind of real. Which leads to the existence of Bunny and how he came to be where he is at—he’s in a limbo, both in this world we call reality and in his own reality with few others for him to be with. It’s as though he is overlapping between two movies playing at once, on the same screen. And this is because he loses ownership over his body—we have seen movies where people become possessed or even telepathically controlled, but to take yourself out of your body and then lose it to some other being? That seems kind of new. And terrifying.

I think Dispirited resonates some of the LDS beliefs and doctrines,
but unless the reader is LDS or extremely familiar with the LDS religion, they would not make the connection from the novel to the LDS religion. I do not think it either builds upon or undermines the LDS belief system. I think, as I said, it might resonate some of the beliefs, but I can’t say it enhances or embodies them entirely. I can’t say it really undermines any of the LDS beliefs because it’s a novel, a book. It’s fiction. Whether or not it is a commentary on the LDS belief system, I don’t have to take it as such.

At some parts of this novel, in connecting to a non-literary experience, I was reminded of a dream I had not too long ago. It was a rather awful dream, more like a nightmare, that felt so real even though it wasn’t my reality. That’s about how deep I’m willing to take that, but it was rather creepy to feel so familiar with some of the storyline depictions.

I think it would be really interesting to have more novels in the same subject matter as this one, at least depicted in a similar way. What else could happen in the overlapping of these realms? What other characters can be developed? What variety of plots could be discovered? As much as I enjoyed this novel, I think having more address these same ideas would be rather refreshing to oppose all the apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic genres we have been seeing lately. Or even away from all the vampire books that are popping up everywhere—no, this was very refreshing and it’d be nice to see more.