Final Exits

Most books about death handle the subject with gloves on. Final Exits takes the gloves off, lays the subject on the table, and starts asking the good questions. How do Americans actually die, and how have the ways we die changed since colonial times? Michael Largo spent years collecting death statistics, obituaries, and records reaching back centuries, then assembled the answers into an illustrated encyclopedia of how we go.

The result won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in Nonfiction, an honor from the Horror Writers Association more often reserved for masters of invented terror. Largo needed no invention. The truth about the ways people die, from the ordinary to the spectacularly unlikely, is stranger than anything fiction offers, and Final Exits catalogues it with a straight face and a raised eyebrow.

Fellow writers noticed. 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. That is the register the book lives in: precise about the facts, amused by the absurdity, respectful of the one appointment nobody cancels.

If you have ever wondered what an encyclopedia of death would look like when written by someone who finds people endlessly interesting, this is it. Start anywhere. The entries have a way of leading to one another, and the book has a way of staying on the nightstand.