Book Review: Not Dead Enough by Tyffany D. Neiheiser

On the night of prom four months ago, high school golden boy Jerry drove his car into a tree and died. His girlfriend and passenger Charlotte survived, and has been having a hard time processing her feelings ever since. It isn’t just that she’s grieving his loss. Everyone around them thought that they were the perfect couple. But no one else knew the rage that Jerry had been hiding, or the pain that Charlotte had become so adept at concealing that sometimes she couldn’t even believe it was real herself:

Something shifted inside me. It was like those hidden 3D pictures. You couldn’t see the whole picture unless you looked at it in a certain way. Just because no one had seen that side of him didn’t mean it wasn’t real. It just depended on how you looked at him.

 

I thought I was supposed to keep his secrets, that that’s what you did for someone you loved.

 

[My therapist] Gemma said not to keep a secret that made me feel bad. Which sounded easy enough, except that I wasn’t sure telling the truth would make me feel any better. No matter what, I ended up feeling terrible.

As Charlotte tries to pick up the pieces for her junior year, she attempts to rebuild the friendships that had fallen to the wayside over the course of her relationship with Jerry, as well as during the summer when she’d been recovering from her injuries. Ian and Lori have been her best friends since she was a little girl, but not even they were privy to the meanness that Jerry seemed to have kept for her alone. Opening up to them feels like an impossible task for her.

Meeting Nate, a fellow insomniac and trauma survivor who also happens to go to the same high school, helps her start feeling good about herself again. But just as she thinks she’s finally on the road to recovery, strange things begin to occur. Things move around in her room. Cold spots appear and disappear. And someone is sending her hateful messages. It takes all her courage to attempt to tell even Lori, her closest confidante:

“I just keep thinking…” I took a deep breath. “Jerry. Jerry would write a note like that.” Even thinking about it made me sick to my stomach. My knees went weak and I lowered myself into a chair.

 

“I guess he’d be pissed about you hanging out with Nate.” Lori frowned and then sat next to me.

 

“Am I crazy to even think it could be him?”

 

Lori shrugged. “Do you think it’s his ghost or something?”

 

I took a breath and reminded myself that thinking my dead boyfriend was sending me notes sounded a lot like paranoia. “Someone’s pranking me, that’s all.”

Charlotte’s attempts to be hyper-rational about what’s happening to her are short-circuited by increasingly awful and creepy incidents. Her parents think she’s just malingering, while her friends have no clue as to the lengths Jerry would go to in order to ensure that she did what he wanted. But surely his need to control her wouldn’t, couldn’t possibly last beyond the grave?

This is a remarkably assured debut novel that highlights the trauma of abusive relationships, particularly in adolescence, and how strongly the effects can linger even after the relationship is over. Charlotte is a sympathetic, empathic girl who finds herself trapped by the world’s refusal to believe her. When she finally finds the courage to tell her story, and more importantly when she finally finds people who accept and understand her, it feels like vindication for every reader who’s ever been gaslit into thinking that they were overreacting in the face of genuine pain.

The mysteries at the heart of the novel – what really happened that fateful night and exactly who is stalking Charlotte now – are handled with just the right touch of the paranormal. Whether or not you believe in ghosts, Not Dead Enough deals movingly with what it takes to heal from past abuse and the shades of those who linger on in our memories, causing pain instead of evoking warmth and love. Tyffany D. Neiheiser is definitely a writing talent to watch.