Notes:

- the eponymous Lincoln is not President Abraham Lincoln, 16th President of the United States of America, but his son, William Wallace 'Willy' Lincoln, who died of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862, aged 11.
- In some schools of Buddhism, bardo or antarābhava is an intermediate, transitional, or liminal state between death and rebirth.

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Grief makes the best of us act in the strangest of ways. When young Willy fell ill and subsequently passed away due to typhoid, a deep change was wrought in his father, President 'Abe' Lincoln, and we thought he would never be the same again.


In "Free Willy", by Peter Beckett


"Do you believe in life after death?", my son asked me. "Will Willy Lincoln go to Heaven?" To these questions, I have no answer, being of a rather stolid disposition towards these matters. Oh, I go to church, same as everybody else, but that is as far as I go.


In "Some things you cannot answer", by Marie Louis


Why not a half-way house, innit? S'long as you're dead, why choose either Heaven or Hell? S'not as if you is being pulled to either - you go as you like, and if neither is fer you, you square yerself and say, "right, well, I'll be hangin' here fer as long as I needs to make up me mind."


In "Graveyard Shift: Philosophical ramblings of a Former Alcoholic",
by L.S. Chutzpah


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This was a difficult book to get through, not least because of literature of the kind mentioned above (all citations mentioned in this review are fictitious), which put me in mind of academic papers and work, but because the story was a confused mess of different narratives and viewpoints, which coddywompled towards a vague ending. The three stars are for the writing itself, but all said and done, I did not enjoy the story, and the enjoyment of any book is, to my mind at least, paramount.