The Ferryman Institute is an Urban Fantasy novel by Colin Gigl.
Ferryman Charlie Dawson saves dead people—somebody has to convince them to move on to the afterlife, after all. Having never failed a single assignment, he's acquired a reputation for success that’s as legendary as it is unwanted. It turns out that serving as a Ferryman is causing Charlie to slowly lose his mind.
Deemed too valuable by the Ferryman Institute to be let go and too stubborn to just give up in his own right, Charlie's pretty much abandoned all hope of escaping his grim existence. Or he had, anyway, until he saved Alice Spiegel. To be fair, Charlie never planned on stopping Alice from taking her own life—that sort of thing is strictly forbidden by the Institute—but he never planned on the President secretly giving him the choice to, either. Charlie’s not quite sure what to make of it, but Alice is alive, and it's the first time he’s felt right in more than two hundred years.
When word of the incident reaches Inspector Javrouche, the Ferryman Institute's resident internal affairs liaison, Charlie finds he's in a world of trouble. But Charlie's not about to lose the only living, breathing person he’s ever saved without a fight. He’s ready to protect her from Javrouche and save Alice from herself, and he’s willing to put the entire continued existence of mankind at risk to do it.
This novel contains examples of the following Tropes:
- Apocalypse How: The reason why keeping the Ferryman Institute a secret from the rest of humanity is because if confirmation of life after death (and that the people running it are just human beings) becomes public knowledge, opportunistic humans on both sides will try to control the system for their own gains and a Class 2 or Class 3a apocalypse will be the result; civilization will upend itself in this epiphany, the amount of obstruction to the on-duty ferryman will result in an uptick of lost souls on Earth, themselves wreaking havoc on Earth.
- Babies Ever After: In the Epilogue, Charles and Alice had officially gotten together with Alice late into pregnancy.
- Broken Ace: Charles Dawson is revered as the best Ferryman the Institute has had in centuries, having an unbroken success-streak exceeding a century. The only problem is that that the constant work with death — the various departed souls having to say goodbye to their friends and loved ones, as well as the trauma of their deaths — combined with the constant workload that being the best entails, has left him with a sense of ennui and depression. Combined with him being too stubborn to ask for emotional support, this has caused Charles to retreat for days at a time without telling anyone, avoiding work whenever he could and only coming in at the barest minimum.
- Celestial Bureaucracy: The Ferryman Institute is the first of many supernatural institutions made to escort the souls of the departed to the afterlife. As mankind grew in size, not only did the Institute have to grow, but Death began "outsourcing" jobs and creating FILOs, or "Ferryman Institute-Like Organizations", like the Sisters of Valhalla, the People's Temple and Death, Inc. to compensate for the workload.
- Fake Nationality: When it is revealed that Cartwright is actually the Roman poet Virgil, Charles asks him why he is so British in spite of his origins. Cartwright responds that he fell in love with England for its tea and William Shakespeare.
- Fate Worse than Death: Ferryman who break one too many rules (or break the really big ones) are sent to Purgatory. It is compared to being put in solitary confinement in a sensory deprivation chamber, the ferryman's thoughts slowly driving them mad. Sanity Slippage is said to kick in between a few months to even a few hours of being there.
- The Ferryman: While the Ferrymen that work at the institute do not go by boat or accept denarius as payment, the gist of what they do is the same: ferry souls from the living realm to the Afterlife.
- Freudian Excuse: The reason why Inspector Javrouche has it out for Charles in the first place is because Charles took a day off when Javrouche's son died. Since the rules forbid ferryman from working with deceased individuals they knew in life, Javrouche was unable to do the case himself and since Charles was the best ferryman they had, he blames Charles when the ferryman sent to fix the situation failed to do just that.
- God's Hands Are Tied: The council is forbidden from directly interfering in ferryman affairs beyond their station, a fact that is more literal than it implies, Cartwright's arms disintegrating when he tries to tackle Javrouche after he kills Melissa.
- Incompetence, Inc.: While the Ferryman Institute is essential to human existence, it is implied that the Institute's success rate has dropped significantly in the following centuries due to a mix of mismanagement and the massive rise in the human population, the founding of FILOs, or "Ferryman Institute-Like Organizations", a result of the workload needing more than one institution to handle it all. In-fact, one of the reasons why the Council would not let Charles retire is because his success rate legitimizes the Ferryman Institute on a grand scale.
- Inevitably Broken Rule: While the Ferryman Institute has many rules and regulations its employees have to work under, three big ones — rules that, if broken, can lead to the Ferryman's immediate transition to Purgatory — are as follows; do not interfere with a death, do not let go of your ferryman key (the thing that makes them invisible to the living) and keep the Ferryman Institute a secret from mankind. The presidential mission Charles was given gave him the option to prevent Alice from committing suicide (which he did), he puts down his key to console with a car-crash victim to make her death a peaceful one and he tells Alice a lot of Institute secrets after they both become fugitives.
- Interservice Rivalry: While it is alleged that Death had commissioned the various Celestial Bureaucracies that make up this world and are simply doing the Institute's job on a smaller scale, it is forbidden for any Ferryman to associate with them to the point where declared traitors for it. Javrouche even tried to have Charles accused of being a spy when it is revealed that there is no record of a Ferryman named "Cartwright", the Ferryman that recruited him, in their files.
- Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Inspector Javrouche puts on airs of treating his job as a ferryman very seriously and that everything he does is for the good of the Institute, but his actions imply otherwise. While Javrouche's criticisms of Charles have a grain of truth it them, his grudge against Charles is blatantly personal, blaming him for his son not crossing over into the afterlife. His methods when it comes to having Charles tried and sent to Purgatory threats of torturing his team and disregarding rules that protect Charles from him. When the Ferryman Council makes Charles president of the institute, the first thing he does is kill the previous president Melissa, mortally wounds Charles, holds Alice at gunpoint and threatens to out the council's existence unless Charles uses his presidential powers to nominate himself as his replacement, intending on enforcing his idea of justice and order onto the institute from the highest authority it has. Charles calls him out on this, pointing out that he can only achieve his own personal idea of "right" with preemptive violence.
- The Omniscient Council of Vagueness: The Ferryman Council is the alleged council formed by the institute's co-founders Charon and Virgil (the original ferryman and the Roman poet respectively) that rules over the Ferryman Institute, managing things under the authority of the President and Death itself. No one actually knows who is in the council, nor is anyone certain they even exist, many presuming that this was just office gossip and that the institute runs on the same handwavium magic that allows them to do their job in the first place. It turns out that the Ferryman Council is not only real, but Charon and Virgil are still members of it, Charles' manager having been the president. They even justify the secrecy of the council's existence as a noble lie to prevent disgruntled ferryman from questioning the Institute's activities, the Institute's job too important and integral to human existence to get bogged down by individual pencil-pushers who think they know better than fallible bosses.
- The Peter Principle: It is revealed at the end that the reason that Charles' countless requests for retirement were denied was specifically because of his stupendous record as a Ferryman, his success-rate ensuring that the Institute looks good in the long-run.
- Physical God: Charon describes being a Council-member as being the closest thing to godhood any human could hope for.
- Secret Test of Character: It is revealed that Charles preventing Alice's suicide was one of these devised by the Ferryman Council. While the Council wanted to keep Charles on their payroll, Cartwright/Virgil argued that all they were doing was torturing a good man by treating him like a tool. Charles was given a choice — save Alice's life or "be a ferryman" and let things take their course. Charles chose to save her life, meaning that he had passed their test and proven Cartwright's point, Charles' reward being either to join the Council or retire to the afterlife.
- Sequel Hook: Inspector Javrouche had escaped custody after his attempted coup of the Institute. Within 5 years, he had located and has since joined one of its competitors — Death, Inc. — who is in-turn very interested in hiring him.
- Soul-Crushing Desk Job: Almost literal in Charles' case. As a Ferryman, Charles' job is to meet with the deceased at the moment of their death and convince them to move on to the afterlife. He is given a very limited amount of information to work with (often a name with cliff-notes of their life if even that) and a limited time to convince them. While Charles is very competent at his job, the only reason why he is so good at it is because he knows how to empathize with the souls he takes care of, and since death is an inherently depressing thing to manage, 200 years of being a ferryman has made him depressed and distant, a mindset compounded by him being too stubborn to confide in anyone about it and the many, many failed attempts at retiring.
- Spanner in the Works: Charles' Secret Test of Character was originally supposed to only be how he handled Alice's case and then the council would invite him to tell him how he did. What they did not count on was for Inspector Javrouche to arrest him for suspicion of espionage against the Institute's interest. While the Council knew of Inspector Javrouche's vendetta against Dawson and had warned him in the past to lay off, counting on Javrouche being enough of a Consummate Professional not to push it further, Javrouche following through on his suspicions and arresting him anyway was not a part of the plan.
- The Time of Myths: Cartwright implies that before Charon and Virgil founded the Institute under Death's orders, the mortal world was wrought with chaos caused by the restless souls of the dead. Should anything happen to the Institute, the world will return to that state and humanity will face extinction.
- Tomato in the Mirror:
- Cartwright is actually Virgil, the famous Roman poet and one of the founding members of the Ferryman Institute.
- Charles' manager Melissa Johnson is the President of the Institute.
- Who Wants to Live Forever?: While Ferryman (as long as they do their job competently enough) are naturally immortal and can file for retirement, Charles had since lost any will to live and has since tried to retire. When given the chance for the immortality to be made permanent as a Councilmember or to be given the chance to leave for the afterlife (after having regained his will to live with his time with Alice), he is given a third option by Melissa to become the President, a position that comes with the caveat that he is made mortal again.
