By Nick Casey

Imagine a blizzard in Antarctica, a mysterious city of the dead, a vast desert and the guerrilla marketing tactics of a near-future version of the Coca-Cola Co. Author Kevin Brockmeier uses the opening of his newest novel, “The Brief History of the Dead” (Pantheon, 2006), to put his best - and luckiest - foot forward.

Brockmeier won an O. Henry Prize in 2005. The New Yorker published the novel’s first chapter before the author had finished its middle section. Even Warner Bros. joined in, snapping up the film rights almost immediately for an undisclosed sum.

Should WB go through with the filming, location may prove a director’s nightmare. About half the novel takes place in a fictionalized city of dead spirits, while the other half skates cautiously across vast ice fields in Antarctica.

If the backdrops are not enough to peak your interest, there is, of course, the plot. In a future version of the world, terrorism has gone biological. Mankind is dying out, succumbing by the billions to an evildoer’s supervirus for which there in no cure in sight. Meanwhile, Dr. Laura Byrd, a researcher marooned in Antarctica, seeks an answer to what is going on in the seemingly silent outside world. The answer: She is the last woman alive.

And yet those who would dismiss “Brief History” as maudlin sci-fi may have to reconsider.

Brockmeier has established himself as a distinct literary phenomenon, blending fantasy with philosophy - an avatar of the genre-bending trend that has taken literary fiction by storm in the last decade. Like most hybridizations, the first experiments with blended forms were often hit-and-miss.

But with prominent authors such as Michael Cunningham and David Mitchell pumping prose into literary fiction - while seeking to combine it with horror, fantasy, science fiction and even romance - we’re beginning to see that the possibilities for literary alchemy in the post-Updike era are as vast as ever. Rabbit is no longer at rest.

And yet for all its daring imagination, “Brief History” just hasn’t been imagined quite enough.

Brockmeier brings a plague to destroy the world and its people, isolates a freezing scientist while allowing her only penguins for company, draws a prophetic vision of the afterlife as a Gothamesque metropolis where spirits simply twiddle their thumbs - and yet ultimately offers no bold vision for what it all means. “Brief History” has the feeling of a novel not quite finished, and Brockmeier becomes the author who has not quite teased out - or worse, shied away from - the implications of his marvel.

Still, the slim “Brief History” does stand up as a compellingly imaginative piece whose elegant story will remain in the minds of readers - and perhaps future moviegoers - for days. In a time when book critics’ most common complaint about novels is long-windedness, here is a book that could actually use a few more pages.

In short, it’s just too brief.