Once Was Enough

Description

Everyone he kills has died before — flatlined, declared gone, then sat up on the table. He thinks the universe made a clerical error. He’s here to file the correction.

The people turning up dead around Meridian share one strange line in their histories: each was once pronounced legally dead and came back, a Lazarus on a gurney, a miracle in the local paper. Now someone is undoing those miracles, one by one, convinced that a life given back was a debt the world forgot to collect.

Hospital chaplain Ezra Okonkwo counsels survivors of exactly that experience — the ones who crossed over and returned changed. When his support group starts thinning and a calm stranger begins attending, asking each member to describe the moment they “shouldn’t” have woken up, Ezra realizes the man isn’t grieving with them. He’s taking attendance.

Quietly cosmic and deeply human, this is horror about second chances and the dread that something keeps score. Walton lets the flatline tone hum under every scene. The worst idea in the book is that he might not be wrong.

Tell the group about the day you came back. He’s listening.