Death, it seems, has a short attention span. A mind that flits from century to century, from subject to subject with the speed of a TV converter. And this Death has a sense of fashion to match his/her Gen-X mentality: “beat generation with a touch of grunge.” Or so British Columbia writer Darlene Barry Quaife would have us believe.

Pitched as “Griffin and Sabine’s evil twin,” Quaife’s third book, Death Writes, is presented as an artifact – a schoolgirl’s scribbler found in a coffeehouse, in which Death has jotted random thoughts and cartoons, pasted quotes and newspaper clippings. Wandering wildly from chess with Jung and theatre with Clarissa Pinkola Estes to garage sale-ing with Margaret Mead and talking cyberspace with the owner of Punki’s CyberCafé, Death treks the globe, scribbling in this notebook, offering anecdotes and wry observations on life and death. The only signpost for readers on this erratic and mysterious journey is the structure of the notebook itself. Originally the property of one Elsie Cole (a schoolgirl from 1921), the book is divided into sections headed by the letters of the alphabet; in each section Elsie wrote seven or eight words starting with the appropriate letter, and Death uses these words as a jumping-off point. The letter J (job, jinx, jejune, jeopardy…), for instance, gives Death an opportunity to discuss a penchant for collecting jargon, as in funeral industry euphemisms for the once-messy business of dying (the coffin is referred to as “casket,” the undertaker a “bereavement counsellor,” and so on).

The problem is, other than the occasional bon mot, Death isn’t very interesting. And the packaging largely overshadows the writing – since the book is broken up into short hits, the reader is never engaged by a narrative. So despite the handwritten pages and diary-esque look, there is none of the eavesdropping thrill of reading someone’s private words. In fact, Death’s name dropping and overly hip metaphors (“that bit of graffiti was like the skin of a sun-dried tomato caught between back molars. I couldn’t leave it alone”) make the character rather dull indeed. If this is Death done up for the 1990s, I’ll take the good old-fashioned Grim Reaper anytime.