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Beyond The Doors Of Death is an interesting little experiment in publishing that pairs a classic story by Robert Silverberg with a sequel by a less well-known Damien Broderick. The Silverberg story is "Born With The Dead," a 1974 novella that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Damien Broderick's "Quicken" is an original story, picking up almost to the day where "Born With The Dead" left off.

"Born With The Dead" was written at a time when Robert Silverberg's career was at a creative peak. Dying Inside had just been published and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction had proposed doing a special Robert Silverberg issue. Silverberg responded with the near-future story of Jorge Klein and his devotion to his dead wife, Sybille.

A breakthrough in technology has made possible the re-kindling of a human personality after death has occurred. There are some changes, physical, mental, and emotional. From Klein's perspective, the most important of these is a lessening of emotional response, to the point where Sybille, like the rest of the dead, is no longer interested in interacting with the living.

Klein's obsession with re-contacting his dead wife fuels the story of "Born With The Dead," and gives us glimpses into a new culture that is establishing itself within protected enclaves, and causing an increasing reaction from the rest of the world. That's pretty much where Silverberg left us at the end, with the beginning of a strange future, and a little understanding of its strange inhabitants.

What the story doesn't address is the how or the why of how the re-kindled dead came to be. That's where Damien Broderick's "Quicken" steps in, as Jorge Klein, now ambassador from the dead to the living, learns where the technology that created the dead came from, and where it leads to. As he does so, the story begins to jump ahead in space and time, first by months, then years, decades, and eventually an entire millennium, with flashes of the war between the living coming and going from Klein's consciousness.

Broderick succeeds in not only extending the story of "Born With The Dead," but also in adopting that stories tone and style, the muted emotional reactions of the dead infuse the narrative, making it read as if seen through a filter created by a different consciousness. The prose mimics the experiences of the dead even as it describes them, making the point once again that the most alien of viewpoints comes from somewhere in ourselves. "Quicken" succeeds because it carries on and expands the vision of a classic story, one that furthered its authors' reputation as a grand master, and provided a template by which a younger talent also gets to show his mastery of, and appreciation for, the classics.

Reviewer Greg L Johnson resides with the living in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Greg's reviews have appeared in publications ranging from The Minneapolis Star-Tribune to the The New York Review of Science Fiction.