Cloud 8

By Grant Bailie

Is there life after death? Do we go to a better place or do our bodies turn to dust? In Cloud 8, debut novelist Grant Bailie addresses these questions by creating a richly imagined and fantastic landscape. James Broadhurst is killed in a car accident and finds himself floating towards the great white light. Instead of being greeted by angels and puffy white clouds, James discovers that the afterlife consists of Abraham Loncoln look-alikes, free beer, a job writing copy for an office product that no one comprehends and watching your dearly departed on television.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0970312520
• ISBN13: 9780970312525
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: Ig Publishing
• Length: 277 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.7" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Written in a small office late at night!!!

WOW! Grant has done the impossibe, combine dead people, dead presidents and dead space into an amazing journey, and fit it into a nice readable thing made out of paper. If you read between the lines in the book you think you see nothing, but look again, and there is a world in a world. Grant could make the life of a third shift security guard seem as important as the President of the United States. This book makes you feel important, no matter who or what you do. I could not write the alphabet to save my life, but Grant sure does a good job for me. Buy and you will like not only the book, but yourself!!!

The Tao of Reading

Every once in awhile you see a movie or read a book you find yourself thinking about much longer than usual. *Cloud 8* by Grant Bailie is that kind of book. I know I will reread it very soon; I need a little time before reading it again, so I can soak up all the metaphysical and experiential nuances that keep occuring to me since reading it the first time, a few days ago. I read it breathlessly, greedily, anxiously, joyfully in one night and one morning James Broadhurst wakes up after a fatal car accident to find himself in an afterlife just as tedious, boring and uninspiring, if not more so, than his life had been. He is assigned a boring roommate, is drafted into a boring job and disovers his boss to be a spoiled hypocrite. His escapes consist of alcohol and television, but television in the aferlife consists of watching all the endlessly tedious details of the daily lives of all the people he loved and who, from one degree or another, cared about him. Chief among these is his father, who he disovers was a much more caring person than he ever realized during his actual life. The most incredible thing about this book is the way Grant Bailie forces, or beguiles the reader into confronting the experiential evidence that the most fascinating thing about life is the way we think about it, is our thoughts and interpretations themselves. Everything "out there" to learn from is right at hand; your noisy upstairs neighbor might be an angel in disguise; the guy sitting next to you on a barstool might rescue you from an eternity of terror for a night; "whatever gets you through the night is alright," as John Lennon put it. This book deserves to be a movie; it has exactly the same attributes to offer us, potentially, as Bill Murray's hilarious, haunting and achingly profound, *Groundhog Day." (...) Listen up, producers: We need this movie! (...)

Cloud 9

I ended up drinking 12-year-old scotch last night while putting together a piece of furniture that my TV set sits atop. The Swedes put in some very easy-to-follow instructions. No words, just pix. It only took me an hour-and-a-half to do something that would have taken a sober/competent man a half-hour to do. I woke up this morning and looked at it. It wasn't leaning to one side or anything. Hurray for me.I didn't know whether it was the scotch mixed with the fatigue of doing honest labor, or whether it was a good book, but I started reading "Cloud 8" by Grant Bailie (a Clevelander) last night after I slapped together the TV stand, and I couldn't stop. Got most of the way through the book by the time my wife returned from work. I got up early this morning and read it for about an hour and then finished it during my lunch hour. This guy's with a micro-press called "Ig Publishing." They have about 10 titles, most of them nonfiction books, notably drinking and eating guides to NY and a pretty good fiction book called, "For F***s Sake." "Cloud 8" is about an ad copywriter who dies--and heaven turns out to be a place with a refrigerator full of free beer, a comfortable couch, a job where you're required to goof off and a TV set that lets you keep up with the living. It's a hoot and a half. Nothing is resolved in the book, the plot is loosey-goosey, and the writing is funny as hell and spot on. Give it a whirl if you're into unconventional fiction.

Grant Bailie could be the guy who lives next door to you...

or he could be the guy who sat next to you in math, or he could be one of the best writers out there who is standing in line behind you at the grocery store and you don't even know it as his writing reflects a kind of quiet, unassuming charm. He uses this wonderful, creative charm to carry you in and out of the memories of his character James' life; and is there with you while James views from the afterlife; the family whom he's left behind, which I found very touching. I loved the way Grant writes with a wit yet at the same time a note of sadness appears now and again in between, and sometimes is the center of the humor. I don't know how he does that. You are laughing at something that written any other way, would make you sad and he's written it so that you laugh anyway. The articulate expression he was able to give to the afterlife catches you off guard and woundering if you aren't infact in it already. ...this is the funniest twist on the afterlife since the movie 'Defending Your Life'. I have ordered another copy since I keep giving away my copies as I want all my friends to read this book. It's beautiful and sad and funny and inventive and charming and a great time.Thank you Grant!!

The magic of death

What if you died, went to "Heaven" and wound up working a job proofing copy for an office product that made no sense, had a distant and uncommunicative roommate, noticed that half the population were dead ringers for Abraham Lincoln, and spent most of your "free" time drinking beer while watching your family back on earth on television as your wife remarried and your father grew old? That is the basic premise of Cloud 8, a wonderfully subtle novel by Grant Bailie. His life after death is unlike any you have ever experienced, one not filled with angels, trumpets and an omniscient God, but moments of quiet and slow revelation (Revelation into what remains a mystery even at the end.) Bailie's writing is an intriguing mix of humor and pathos, and I found myself thinking about this book long after I finished it. It is one of those rare novels that makes you think and think, and even after you are all thought out, you still aren't sure you know the answer, or if there is even an answer at all. One of the best books I have read so far in 2003.