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The Healthy Dead

The Healthy Dead

Graphic novelDark FantasyFantasy
Pages
100
Published
2004
Language
English

Synopsis

Bauchelain and Korbal Broach arrive in a city governed by a Wellness Council that has banned every conceivable vice — drink, meat, sloth, sin — in the name of civic virtue. The population is miserable. When the necromancer and his companion set up practice, the collision between their complete moral freedom and the city's totalitarian wellness doctrine produces Erikson's most sustained piece of political satire. The Healthy Dead is a comedy of ideas disguised as a horror novella: a skewering of moral paternalism, prohibitionist thinking, and the violence inherent in enforced virtue. Emancipor Reese suffers, as always.

Prose complexity
3/10

Vibe

DarkSatiricalFunnyAtmospheric
Morally GreyAnti-HeroVillain ProtagonistSurvival

Genres

Dark Fantasy Fantasy Horror Graphic Novels

About the author

S
Steven Erikson

Steven Erikson was born Steve Rune Lundin in Toronto in 1959 and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He trained as an archaeologist and anthropologist — completing fieldwork on Indigenous sites in the Canadian Shield — before earning a graduate degree through the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He writes under a pen name adopted to avoid confusion with the American novelist Steve Erickson. The world of the Malazan Book of the Fallen has its origins not in a manuscript but in a tabletop roleplaying campaign....

Characters

BauchelainProtagonist

The necromancer navigating a city that has banned everything interesting — with his usual combination of courtesy and catastrophe.

Korbal BroachProtagonist

Whose hobbies are, if anything, enhanced by a city full of healthy specimens.

Emancipor ReeseProtagonist

The manservant caught between his employers and a city whose virtue-enforcement is genuinely horrifying.

Ineb CoughAntagonist

The head of the Wellness Council whose righteous conviction drives the city's joyless oppression.

All characters in The Healthy Dead

Frequently asked questions

  • What is The Healthy Dead about thematically?

    It is a satire of moral paternalism and prohibitionist government — the idea that a state enforcing virtue on its citizens produces its own kind of tyranny. Erikson uses dark comedy to make the argument.

  • Does it connect to the main series?

    Set in the same world but not tied to MBotF events. The B&KB stories are self-contained.