From Cat Valente, a brilliant post on mainstream attempted use of fantasy techniques without really understanding them (via the estimable Theodora Goss), and the creation of a useful term:  afterlife porn.

Because that's it. What passes for fantastic fiction in the mainstream is almost entirely this: "You Will Not Die, And Neither Will Those You Love". There are other elements, certainly, but that is the underlying point of its writing and its reading.

So, of course, there is no underlying logic or structure to it. The more fictional plausibility the author creates, the less spiritual plausibility it has, because it becomes about the writer's creative work, and not the reader's denial of death. Those damn writers and their fictions. Just messes up a good book.

The still-living spirits of the dead are not part of daily life (for most people, anyway), so techniques of fantastic fiction seem a natural tool to use. But in the cases at hand these techniques are the accidents of fantasy, and not their substance (using the terminology of Aristotelian physics for literary criticism is perverse, I'm aware, and I suppose there are better literary terms for what I'm talking about, but I don't know what they are--Dora will know).

In her own post referring to Ms. Valente's rant, Dora (I use her first name because, believe or not, I actually know her.  Not her fault, it just happened) goes off on The Time Traveler's Wife.  Now, I actually liked TTTW better than she did (and felt weird liking it--not my usual thing), but it, again, is about denial of death. Dora sees it as a Scenes From a Marriage kind of thing merely, but I think it too is a kind of afterlife porn, with that being a significant emotional element.

Now Ms. Valente and Dora have me thinking, always a dangerous thing. Fear of death makes you accept all sorts of implausibilities. There are people who believe in ghosts, reincarnation, and the afterlife, all at the same time. I suspect those people are not usually readers of my books, or Ms. Valente's or Dora's either.