You can’t take it with you.

That’s the sad part about amassing great wealth and fine possessions: when you die, you’ll leave it all behind. You exit this world with the same belongings that you have when you enter and there’s nothing you can do to change that. At least, in the new book, “Together We Will Go” by J. Michael Straczynski, you don’t have to do it alone.

People of his parents’ generation never understood.

Not for lack of trying but because they couldn’t, and that truth really bugged Mark Antonelli. He was pushed by uncaring parents to get a college degree – and for what? So he could pay rent, owe tens of thousands in student loans, get a dead-end job, and be miserable until the day he died? No thanks, and there had to be others like him.

And so Mark went looking for them.

Posting an ad on a national website, he sought people who’d agree to board a converted bus with him, heading to San Francisco. On arrival, they’d “ditch the driver, find an appropriate seaside cliff… then just as the sun kisses the horizon, we hit the gas and drive out of this world.”

Bon voyage, sayonara. Who was up for it?

Karen was the first to be picked up. For most of her life, she’d lived with chronic, agonizing pain. Lisa, who suffered from mental illness, was next aboard. Tyler had a life-threatening problem with his heart. Vaughn was living with a secret he could no longer bear. Shanelle had been bullied for her weight. Zeke was an addict who boarded the bus with his dying cat. Theresa and Jim were star-crossed lovers. And Theo was simply done with life.

Their driver, Dylan, said they’d be there in less than a month. Mark insisted that everybody upload their thoughts to the cloud, so there’d be a record of it all. They’d end their lives, but not before Mark’s real intentions became apparent, and the police were on their trail…

If you couldn’t already tell, “Together We Will Go” is dark. Like, five-minutes-after-3-a.m. dark, in a story that seems almost as if author and screenplay writer J. Michael Straczynski tossed a handful of marbles on a trampoline: this character pings here, that plotline goes there and there and there, and threads bounce out.

And some just end, adding to the wry pessimism of a tale that’s also snarkily hilarious, profane in the right spots, uncommonly wise, and nicely allegorical in ways will mean different things to different readers as they’re pushed toward what surely must be a squirmy end. Don’t squinch your eyes shut, though: keep watch on the chaos of the storytelling itself here, the exceptional characterization, and the mini-saving graces that Straczynski allows in his tale.

This isn’t a book for everybody. It deals with a serious subject in the most sardonic way possible that’s impossible to put down. And that’s good: in the case of “Together We Will Go,” you can take it with you.

By Terri Schlichemeyer

“Together We Will Go: A Novel” by J. Michael Straczynski
c.2021, Scout Press
$27.00 / $36.00 Canada
296 pages