"It is with regret that the death is announced of Ethan Pierce, 91, former south-western representative of Bell-Boy Elevators Inc., Chicago, Ill. May all who have risen find peace."

It was not unexpected that Ethan Pierce, 91, should have died when he did. Everyone dies eventually, and if you reach Ethan's elevated age then you can reasonably expect to go sooner than most. The thing that surprised the citizens of Baghdad more was that he'd been in elevators. That was, before the former-elevator man made his final ascent during the big thunder storm and rose from the dead.

Perry Jemson found him walking alongside of the road after the rain came. Like Frankenstein's monster, lightning breathed new life (old life?) in the stiffened corpse, and now the people of Baghdad have to come to terms with an incontestable phenomena among their number.

The single event at the heart of Jeremy Poolman's novel is remarkable, but it is more the impetus than the raison d'etre of his publishing debut. A man rising from the dead is always news (although "passe these days in the world of the strange"), and here it attracts the careful attentions of the curious Jubal A. Early, correspondent for Weird But True Magazine:

"...the idea of a man coming back to life again was no more unusual - indeed a good deal less unusual - than say...a child being born with a luminous head (Emporia, Kansas), or an entire High School swimming team Mack's Creek, Missouri) being swept up by aliens whose only means of interplanetary transport was a 1976 Oldsmobile Fairway."

Jubal haunts the town until he realises something genuinely extraordinary has happened - then kidnaps this latter-day Lazarus to get his story.

Of course Ethan Pierce's story belongs to the centre of Poolman's book, but Ethan is there for the spur he provides to everyone - waitresses, policemen, drifters - to take to the desert roads in a tumbleweed search of what's missing: lost dreams, love, that last chance. This, then, is the stuff of spiritual odyssey, finding redemption in the parched vista of Arizona.

What Poolman is good at is desert. His prose is hard, as arid as the landscape he is describing. He invokes the rolling sands, the horizontal mountains, the limitless Crayola-blue sky, the dark slash of rain with a cinemist's eye. The sense of these lost souls moving about within boundless space is palpable. Less so the characters themselves who are often reduced largely to what they say. If this were film (and there's a good film in here somewhere) then it would matter less than it does. After a while these cease to be individuals and the pull of the first few chapters gives over to an on-the-road ennui. He finds a nice metaphor for Ethan's second (inevitable) death, but by then we are no longer sure we know why it matters.

Poolman - an Englishman who lives in the States and New Zealand - obviously has talent, and, to judge by his youthful photo, plenty of time to see it through to something more consequential than this likeable but ultimately insubstantial piece. Cover's fantastic, mind.