Six-Feet-Under meets Edward Scissorhands in Mortal Remains,
a tight, smartly-written romance with an occult twist.
Though her classmates call her Morticia and Ghoul Girl, Cally actually
likes her work—the dead are good listeners, and they don't judge. Cally
learns their stories, shares her worries with them as she makes up their
faces, and embroiders pillows for their final rest. “The way I figure it,” says
Cally, “a person's arrival into this world is about as unglamorous as it gets.
The least I can do is dignify their departure."
Then, after a mysterious explosion burns down a neighborhood house
long the source of weird stories, Cally and her friends poke around in the
debris and come across the hatch to an underground vault. Inside, they
find an injured teenage boy who has been trapped there for days. He has
little memory of his life before the explosion and speaks in an odd, stilted
manner that suggests limited interaction with the outside world. Yet the
boy, Adam, feels there is something familiar about Cally—and Cally must
admit that she feels a strange connection to him as well. Could Adam
be the boy who, years ago, protected her from the bullying of a gang of
neighborhood kids? But when she finds out that boy died shortly after
their encounter, she realizes Adam couldn't be him…could he? Where
did Adam come from, anyway? And, most importantly, why was he kept
prisoner by his own father?