Before the first star had a name and long after the last one burns out, Void has been standing at the threshold between the living world and everything that comes after it. As the son of Anti Life, his purpose is singular and inescapable: to welcome every soul that his father’s nature touches into the realm beyond the Onyx Doors. He reads each arriving soul, finds what it loved most, and becomes it, just long enough to ease the passing. He does this without complaint, without rest, and for an almost incomprehensible stretch of time, without wanting anything for himself.
Three times across all of history, that changes.
In ancient Mesopotamia, a shepherd boy scratches maps of the stars into clay at night, trying to give the infinite a grammar. In Renaissance Florence, a painter’s apprentice sees something in Void’s face that does not belong entirely to this world and puts it on canvas. And in the present day, a singer whose words cut straight to the heart with the kind of honesty that most people spend their whole lives avoiding finds in Void the only listener who has ever truly understood what he was saying.
Each time, Void loves with his whole self, which is the only way he knows how. Each time, Anti Life moves as he always moves, without malice and without pause. And each time, the boy Void loves arrives at the Onyx Doors, and Void must be both the one who is grieving and the one who holds it open.
The Day Love Died is a queer literary fantasy narrated by a verbose, warm hearted, and quietly devastated Narrator who would very much have preferred a story about dogs and jam. It is a book about the loneliness of existing outside of life and death, the particular cruelty of loving when you are dead itself, and the strange, stubborn courage of a being who chooses, again and again across all of time, to love anyway.
It is the companion novel to The Day Life Quit, set in the same universe, and it will stay with you long after you have closed it.
