Books about death that do not flinch
There is a whole shelf of books about death written by people who would rather be writing about something else. This is not that shelf.
Michael Largo
Bestselling Author
Most books about death handle the subject with gloves on. There are good reasons for this. The topic is genuinely painful for most readers most of the time, and a writer who forgets that produces something callous.
But the gloves have a cost. Handled too gently, death becomes abstract, and abstraction is its own kind of dishonesty about the one appointment nobody cancels.
The book that took the gloves off
Final Exits lays the subject on the table and starts asking the useful questions. How do Americans actually die. How have the ways we die changed since colonial times. What has replaced what, and why.
Answering that required years of collecting death statistics, obituaries, and records reaching back centuries, then assembling them into an illustrated encyclopedia rather than an argument. The encyclopedic form matters. An argument asks you to accept a conclusion. A catalogue hands you the evidence and steps back.
A horror award for a book with no monsters
The result won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, an honor from the Horror Writers Association more often associated with masters of invented terror.
No invention was required. The truth about the ways people die, from the entirely ordinary to the spectacularly unlikely, is stranger than what fiction tends to offer, and the book catalogues it with a straight face and a raised eyebrow.
What other writers said
Daniel Handler, who writes as Lemony Snicket, warned that every mortal should read this book before they find themselves in its pages. Peter Straub called it endlessly fascinating, often amusing, and always riveting.
Those two descriptions together map the register the book operates in: precise about the facts, amused by the absurdity, and respectful of the subject in the only way that ultimately counts, which is by getting it right.
Where the fixation came from
The book is honest about its own origin. The obsession with mortality that produced it began with the author's own close calls, which is the sort of detail a more guarded writer would leave out and a more sensational one would put on the cover.
You can read more about that road, from the poetry of the East Village through Florida grit lit to the encyclopedias, on the about page.
The rest of the shelf
Death is a large enough subject to require several volumes. The Portable Obituary narrows the question to the famous and how their lives shaped their exits, and was itself a Bram Stoker Award finalist. Genius and Heroin takes the self-destructive kind. God's Lunatics handles the deaths people volunteered for in the name of belief.
Together they form the macabre catalog, which is the work this author is known for and the reason the horror world keeps claiming him. For the seasonal version of this list, see Halloween books for adults.
Common questions
What is the best book about how people die? expand_more
Final Exits is the one that won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction. It is an illustrated encyclopedia of how Americans die and how those causes have shifted since colonial times, built from years of statistics, obituaries, and archival records.
Why did a nonfiction book win a horror award? expand_more
The Horror Writers Association gives the Bram Stoker Award for superior achievement across several categories, including nonfiction. Final Exits won it in 2006 because the documented reality of how people die needs no invention to unsettle a reader.
Is Final Exits morbid or funny? expand_more
Both, deliberately. Peter Straub called it endlessly fascinating, often amusing, and always riveting. The facts are handled precisely and the absurdities are allowed to be absurd.
Where should I start with books about death? expand_more
Final Exits for the general question of how people die, or The Portable Obituary if you are more curious about specific famous deaths. Both are encyclopedic, so neither requires reading front to back.