Obituary ManPaperback, 1 May 2013

Behold: Obituary Man! A nondescript man who gains indescribable energy from reciting the eulogy at the funerals of strangers. He has never felt so alive! Maurice Petit is the unremarkable type, unaware of his own loneliness until, one morning, on his way to work he feels the crowds in the street press on him. He chokes on the weight of his routine. At work he consults his horoscope, which says that some great threat is close at hand. This warning seems the harbinger of some great end, the death he assumes to be imminent. Next to the horoscopes he finds the Obituary section and the name of a classmate from his elementary school. Maurice Petit has reached that lackluster age when peers die of heart attacks, and his own heart races. As he flees the office he tells the secretary, "I have an appointment with a dead man." At the funeral something compels Maurice Petit to stand tall and speak. For a moment he is Obituary Man and has a voice for the dead. But will his newfound power rejuvenate him or get him mixed up with the wrong crowd?