53 pages • 1 hour read
Neal ShustermanEverlost
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Afterlights”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “On the Way to the Light…”
On a windy mountain road in upstate New York, a white Toyota collides head-on with a black Mercedes. Allie sits in the front seat of the Toyota and has taken off her seatbelt to adjust her shirt. She’s arguing with her father about the radio. In the center backseat of the Mercedes, Nick eats a half-melted chocolate bar without a seatbelt.
Allie’s dad hits a piece of steel in the road, blowing out the left front tire and sending the Toyota into oncoming traffic. Nick and Allie see the other car coming toward them, and when the vehicles collide, the two children go through the front windshield. Allie feels herself moving through a dark tunnel with a light at the end of it. She bumps into Nick, and they both spiral out of control. They hit the ground and fall into a long, dreamless sleep.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Arrival in Everlost”
A young boy jumps from tree to tree high above the forest floor. He hears a crunch of metal, which startles him and causes him to fall to the ground. He climbs the steep, rocky slope to the mountain road and sees numerous emergency vehicles surrounding a car accident. When he doesn’t see anyone, he returns to his forest. Back at the bottom of the cliff, he sees Allie and Nick lying on the ground. He notices both kids have no injuries or tears in their clothing, so he sits and waits for them to wake up.
Allie wakes and finds herself on the ground in a dense forest. She sees Nick lying nearby, and she suddenly remembers a brief moment of the crash. As she and Nick regain their full senses, a mysterious boy greets them. Allie stands and talks through her memory of driving past a forest of dead trees on the mountain road, noting that the forest she sees now appears to be alive and healthy. Nick recognizes Allie, and the siblings suddenly remember the head-on collision but realize they have no injuries. They introduce themselves and ask the younger boy his name, but he refuses to say it. Nick and Allie then realize that they might be the only survivors of the crash, and the young boy laughs. Allie asks to borrow his telephone, but he says he doesn’t have one. When he refuses to give his name, Allie decides to call him Lief.
Lief takes his new friends up the cliff to the accident site. They only find tiny bits of metal and glass as evidence of the crash. Allie steps into the road and feels that its surface is soft and spongy, and Lief warns her not to stand in one spot too long. Cars and trucks pass by, so Nick and Allie try to signal them to stop. No one does, so Allie steps into the middle of the northbound lane. A Greyhound bus approaches but doesn’t slow down. Allie tries to move but finds her feet have sunk six inches into the asphalt. She pulls her feet out, but not before the bus hits her. Allie passes through it, unhurt.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Dreamless”
As the siblings come to terms with being dead, Lief tells them that they have been asleep for nine months. The boy also explains that they will always appear as they did upon their deaths, which means that Nick will never be able to get the melted chocolate off his face. Lief then takes them to his treehouse to cheer them up. When they climb to the top, Lief pushes Nick and Allie off as a game, but the fall scares Allie and makes her cry. Lief accuses them of wanting to leave him as the others have and says they’ll sink to the center of the Earth, but he doesn’t care. When Nick says Lief doesn’t know anything, Lief goes to the highest perch in one of his trees. He tries to convince himself that Nick and Allie won’t leave him because they need him.
After Lief withdraws, Nick and Allie discuss their situation. Nick believes they never made it to the afterlife, as this place is more of an interlife because it’s in-between life and death. Nick wouldn’t mind staying in the pretty forest forever and adjusting as Lief has. Nick and Allie climb to the treehouse and ask Lief about the others he mentioned. Lief explains that kids pass through his forest occasionally on their way somewhere else. He says they’re always trying to escape the McGill, the worst monster in Everlost.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “A Coin on Its Edge”
Night falls, leaving the kids to continue talking under a moonless sky. Nick refers to himself and Allie as ghosts, but his sister doesn’t like it. Lief says they’re Afterlights because they glow. He tells them about the McGill, a terrible monster that catches Afterlights to make them suffer and hates kids and the noise that they make. Lief also says they’re safe in his forest because the McGill doesn’t know it exists, but Nick and Allie aren’t convinced. Lief urges them to hide in the forest with him to avoid being eaten by the McGill, but Nick and Allie decide to go back to their home in New Jersey, thinking that they might be able to find a way back to either the living world or the true afterlife.
The children make snowshoes out of twigs and bark strips to prevent their feet from sinking into the ground and allow them to travel faster. Lief begs them to stay, saying he’s been praying for friends to find him so he won’t have to be alone. Allie says they can’t stay but might return for him after learning more about their situation. Lief thanks them for giving him a name and disappears into his treehouse.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary: “Friends in High Places”
Chapter 5 introduces the character of Mary Hightower, an Afterlight who no longer remembers her name but knows only that it starts with an M. (She took the name of Mary because it sounds motherly, and she sees herself as being a mother to the Afterlights.) Mary stands at the top floor of her tower, looking down on the living world’s traffic, when Stradivarius (“Vari” for short), a mousy boy with curly blond hair, steps into the room.
Vari tells Mary that a Finder wants to show her something. Mary agrees, so Vari leaves and returns with a 13-year-old boy nicknamed Speedo because he’s wearing nothing but a swimsuit. The boy shows Mary a birthday cake, and she dips her fingers into the frosting and savors its sweetness. Mary tells Speedo he’s brilliant for waiting at hundreds of birthday parties for a cake to cross over and promises not to tell anyone his secret. Mary trades a silver, late-model Jaguar for the birthday cake.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary: “Scavengers”
Nick remembers everything about his life before the car accident, yet he wonders how long it will take him to forget everything as Lief has done. By the third day, Allie and Nick move out of the mountains and pass town after town. The dullness of their world makes them long for Lief’s forest. On the sixth day, Nick and Allie wake to find four boys standing over them. The boys yank them to their feet, and one says Nick and Allie must be Greensouls, newcomers to Everlost. Nick tells Johnnie-O, the gang leader, to leave them alone, but Johnnie-O says they must pay to cross his territory. When the boys search Nick and Allie, they find a faceless coin in one of Nick’s pockets but return it to him, believing it to be worthless. When they find a wad of chewed gum in a wrapper, Johnnie-O takes the gum and chews it, disgusting Nick and Allie, and says that because the gum isn’t enough to buy them passage, Allie must become his servant. Johnnie-O orders his friends to grab Allie, but she threatens to call the McGill, and the boys stop to discuss the validity of her threat. Johnnie-O orders his thugs to grab Allie, and they push on her shoulders, causing her to sink quickly into the ground.
Suddenly, he hears a high-pitched scream and sees a figure running toward them with flailing arms. Allie is completely submerged, unable to hear, see, or scream. She fears this is how she will spend eternity when someone grabs her and pulls her to the surface, where she sees Lief lifting her out of the ground. Nick tells her that Johnnie-O and his gang ran away in terror. The three children continue their journey, energized by knowing that there are other Afterlights to be found. They follow the Hudson River and arrive in New York City the following day. Lief is overwhelmed by how much New York has grown in the 100 years he’s been in Everlost. Nick and Allie go first to the Twin Towers.
Part 1, Chapters 1-6 Analysis
In this section, Neal Shusterman quickly and efficiently introduces the novel’s exposition, inciting incident, and primary characters. By keeping the novel’s exposition brief and to the point, Shusterman adds suspense and tension to the plot and plunges directly into the business of world-building as the story develops around the central conflict of the siblings’ need to either return home or move on into the proper afterlife; thus, the tale takes on the form of both a mystery and a quest as the fledgling Afterlights set forth to make sense of their new existence.
Shusterman wastes no time in developing each character’s main traits early in the narrative, for Allie’s attempts at problem-solving immediately demonstrate that she is pragmatic and logical, while Nick’s worries show him to be more pessimistic and gloomy. Similarly, Lief’s positive attitude and willingness to leave the safety of his forest’s safety to ensure Nick and Allie don’t come to harm show him to be a brave and reliable friend who values loyalty over his own safety. Thus, the three protagonists then initiate a monomyth, a literary term denoting the age-old theme of the hero’s journey. In this sense, Allie represents the hero archetype within this small company, whereas Nick represents the ally archetype and Lief the mentor archetype. Together, they will work to solve the central conflict of getting Nick and Allie home or to the afterlife. Also introduced in this section is Mary Hightower, the novel’s primary antagonist. (At this point, Mary does not yet show herself to be evil, but her position of power over New York City’s Afterlights is designed to inject an element of distrust, as those with power often have hidden motives beyond who and what they appear to be.)
A critical element of fantasy fiction is world-building, and Shusterman is known for his ability to describe fantastical worlds with great detail and creativity, creating unique physical laws and social conventions to make his stories stand apart from those based upon mundane reality. In Everlost, for example, the spirit world clearly functions according to its own strange laws that exist beyond the realm of conventional physics, as when the characters sink into the ground due to what Mary Hightower calls Gravity Fatigue. If the Afterlights cannot find something solid to hold onto, they will drop into the Earth’s core. Dead-spots, which manifest where a person dies, are the only places where Afterlights won’t sink. (Paradoxically, they are also the places that appear the most “alive” to the eyes of an Afterlight.) For example, the dead trees of Lief’s forest appear to be alive and beautiful, implying that dead-spots are also brighter and more vivid to the Afterlights than in the rest of Everlost. Thus, the siblings’ first few encounters in the world of Everlost serve as a primer that explains how Shusterman’s world operates without forcing him to resort to lengthy explanations that interrupt the flow of the story.
Another example of Shusterman’s world-building is the lack of adults in Everlost. Mary Hightower explains that adults can more easily get to wherever they’re going —such as heaven or another form of afterlife—so only kids get stuck in this limbo state. Also, the kids who find themselves in Everlost quickly begin losing their memories. For example, Mary and Lief don’t remember their real names. Likewise, Afterlights can even forget what they looked like in life, so their appearance sometimes shifts. (The fact that Afterlights have a tendency to shape-shift over time becomes essential later in the narrative, when Allie finally faces the McGill, a monster notorious for hunting and torturing Afterlights, and discovers its true nature.) Just as the Afterlights might shift in appearance as their memory and self-image fade, their body functions also change. They no longer need to breathe, though Greensouls like Nick and Allie still crave breathing because it feels normal. They also continue to sleep not because they are tired but because it helps them to feel alive. Afterlights also don’t need to eat or drink, yet they still crave food and find joy in tasting it, as Mary does with the birthday cake Speedo brings her.
Finally, this section introduces the use of book excerpts to help readers better understand Everlost. Most of these excerpts come from books that Mary Hightower writes for the Afterlights to understand their environment better. Shusterman places these excerpts at the end of most chapters, and they always refer to a specific aspect mentioned in the chapter and elaborate on it with more detail. For example, at the end of Chapter 2, Shusterman includes a passage from Mary Hightower’s book Sorta Dead, which teaches Afterlights how to approach Greensouls and to be honest and upfront when explaining their new condition.
This information is provided just after the scene in which Lief tries to help Allie and Nick adjust to their new situation. Thus, readers get a more vivid understanding of Everlost without reading extensive description, which can be disengaging for a young audience. This method of providing detail also demonstrates Shusterman’s creativity in world-building while engaging his readers more fully.
Related Titles
By Neal Shusterman
