Heaven is filing.
Hell is filing.
Earth, on balance, is screwed.

A note from Dodie

Heaven is, on the record, a multi-billion-soul garden currently being run by the same staff who started in 43 AD. It has always been understaffed. It is now also under-managed, under-resourced, and very slightly under-water. The captain, as you may have heard, saw the iceberg early and skedaddled.

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Hell, by contrast, is fully staffed. This is, in its own way, worse.

In the middle, Earth — going about its day, paying its bills, mostly unaware — is the bit where things tend to happen, because Earth is the bit where the residents of both upstairs and downstairs come for a good time. They drink in Soho. They feud in southern France. They steal each other’s exes in Hell and each other’s biscuits in Heaven.

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Most of the time, the system holds. When it doesn’t — when, say, somebody who is supposed to have died at 9.07 on a Tuesday morning is still alive at 9.13 — somebody has to be sent down to investigate. That is where the trilogy starts. It is, broadly, where it ends, too. The problem is just substantially larger by the end.

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The books are British, adult, and run on roughly equal parts dry observation, profanity, and tea. I wrote them to be the sort of thing you’d read in a single weekend on a sofa, in your dressing gown, with a glass of something next to you. That is genuinely the use case.

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Welcome to the wreckage. Heaven is filing. Hell is filing. Earth, on balance, is screwed.

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If you’d like to come in, the door is open.

 

Mind the goat.

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— Dodie