The most recommended books about cemeteries

This book has just the right of darkness to keep a kid hooked at night, and my daughter loved the ghosts from across the ages who are fighting the bad guys who want to murder the little boy they have taken under their wing in a cemetery after his family is killed.

Many would point to Flagg’s Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café as her opus to rural America, but the broader scope of The Whole Town’s Talking pulled me in instantly.

She draws out a full history of a small town, its good and bad and the people that made their mark there, some from birth to death. Even after death, their voices remain an active part of her tale, remaining as unbashful observers from the cemetery on the hill.

So much of rural America has fallen into disrepair, as does Flagg’s fictional Elmwood Springs, but I hold out hope that the increase in telecommuting and simmering desires to leave urban (and suburban) lives behind can reinvigorate some of these sleeping villages that are spread across much of the nation. 

Many of my books are ghost stories, and I enjoy finding other authors who write scary stories in that genre. Darcy Coates, a prolific author from Australia, does a wonderful job creating an eerie, spine-tingling setting and characters who will remind you of that monster you thought was in the closet. These are downright scary stories that will cause you to sleep with the light on. She has written numerous excellent stand-alone books, but her Gravekeeper series is a great way to delve into the mind of an author who has this genre nailed down tight (just like that coffin that might be hidden behind a wall in your basement)!   

Greg Melville’s Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America’s Cemeteries is a highly personal yet richly researched investigation into the history of U.S. cemeteries. Best of all, Melville doesn’t just study gravestones or the final resting place of famous people, he takes a deep dive into nearly every aspect of memorialization, including landscapes, mortuary practices, economics, and social rituals.

This work is divided into three clearly differentiated parts.

The first delves into the development of state administration, both in the royal court and in the provinces during the third millennium BC. The second delves into the structure and organization of a cemetery contemporary with Qubbet el-Hawa, where I excavate, so it offers me a complementary perspective of analysis. Finally, Harco Williams focuses on the study of the diversity of funerary inscriptions present on the coffins of the Middle Kingdom.

Even though it’s 12 years old, this is still the definitive history of burial grounds in America. I honestly cannot rave about it enough. Although the book looks dry and intimidating, I promise you it’s anything but. Yalom provides solid information about the history of burial and burial grounds in the United States, leavened with personal reflections inspired by the graveyards she visited as she researched. If anything can inspire a desire to travel to visit cemeteries, The American Resting Place will set your feet on the path.

It takes courage to carry on living after an emotional catastrophe. Some of us never quite make it and others, like Masha in The Wisdom of Sally Red Shoes, get there with a little help from unexpected places.

This book made me both laugh and cry. It is poignant and emotional but also parades crazy, colourful characters such as eccentric Elvis and Sally Red Shoes herself. This character of the book’s title has a relatively small but important part in the book, bursting into Masha’s life during her regular meanders in a Victorian graveyard. 

Have the tissues ready!

Although Ross’s book appears to be a guide to visiting graveyards, its focus often turns toward the people who work there: gravediggers, tour guides, historians, and even memorial artists. One of my favorite essays in the book introduces a modern maker of death masks, whose work appears on three headstones in Highgate Cemetery. The eulogy for “the best-known guide at the most famous cemetery in Ireland” nearly brought me to tears.

A Tomb With A View tells the stories of the graveyards and their dead, true, but most of all Ross conveys how the relationships between the dead and those who remain behind deepen with time. A lovely, life-affirming book.

This is one of the few books on cemeteries that captures the unmistakable ethereal beauty of graveyards. Sandra Clark’s spectacular photographic collection of images from some of America’s most breathtaking memorials in New Orleans brings together art and science, soliloquy and stone, and most importantly, life and death.

Exciting, thrilling, and full of surprises as any detective story, but with the depth and colour of human beings as in a classic novel.

It was impossible to put down the book once I started. When finished, it left a strong urge to visit all the places mentioned in the book in the hope of finding something of the unbending spirit from the characters described so vividly by this brilliant author.

For many of us who study cemeteries, there is a danger of thinking that these landscapes of the dead are just bodies and gravestones. Katherine Ramsland’s Cemetery Stories: Haunted Graveyards, Embalming Secrets, and the Life of a Corpse After Death is one of the few books out there that details every step between death and internment, which are just as revealing about American culture as a fancy gravestone epitaph or a biography of a deceased local celebrity.

Evelyn Waugh’s 1947 visit to Hollywood to negotiate a movie deal for Brideshead Revisited was a failure. But a trip to Forest Lawn Cemetery provided the gist for The Loved One, his last great satire. Waugh transforms Forest Lawn into Whispering Glades, a grandiose Disneyland of Death where cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos puts the finishing touches on elite Los Angelenos under the lustful eye of mortician Mr. Joyboy. The naïve Aimée meets Dennis Barlow, a British expat and failed writer who passes off the works of Tennyson and Keats as his own. When she discovers Barlow works at the Happy Hunting Ground Pet Cemetery, even advice columnist Guru Brahmin can’t console her. Waugh’s piercing prose exposes the pretense and hypocrisy of the American Way of Life (and Death). 

If you like visiting cemeteries, then this slender, profusely illustrated volume is a necessity. Keister, a professional photographer, covers an impressively wide variety of topics. He outlines key architectural forms and defines the meaning of floral, animal, and religious iconography. Keister goes beyond the standard New England skull-and-crossbones to identify symbols used in various regions and cultures, and discusses Hebrew, Islamic, and Chinese, and Japanese religious icons in addition to Christian motifs. He also includes handy features like an alphabetical list of acronyms of societies, clubs, and organizations to help decipher mysterious abbreviations. A concluding chapter on “Final Impressions” profiles unique and unusual memorials from around the world. Keister’s excellent photographs illustrate the various symbols succinctly. 

This was a gripping gothic tale of loss, despair, and denial.

The crafting of the main character’s heartbreak into a blinkered, macabre obsession with her dead daughter is absolutely devesting and I loved the way the author painted a picture of the coffin, which gave the mother a window into her daughter’s corpse and fed that obsession rather than brought any kind of comfort.

The escalation from inconsolable grief to near-necromancy recalls the gothic horror of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary and the author expertly mixed this influence with a dash of Edgar Allen Poe to craft a tragic mother who turns to deception and murder to reunite with her daughter.

Any collection of famous people’s gravesites is going to be idiosyncratic. Ask 10 people whose graves they would like to visit and you will get 100 different answers. That said, this is the most entertaining and reasonably comprehensive encyclopedia of the graves of the famous that you will find outside of Find-a-Grave. I’ve gotten hours of fun from it.

Since it contains very few grave monument photographs, Where Are They Buried? includes a whole lot of people whose ashes have been scattered. I would have loved to leave a rose at the grave of John Lennon, but the Strawberry Fields mosaic in Central Park will have to do.

This is the book where it all began. Mark Harris opened up eyes and hearts to the beauty of burying our loved ones naturally and on our own terms. I had never read such a clear reality of the embalming process and how Americans morphed from simple home burial to the industrial Googleplex of the funeral business. Want to be buried in your backyard or with a sheet off your bed? Read this book! The author is a former environmental columnist with the Los Angeles Times Syndicate and his work has been featured in many fabulous places.

The Monkey’s Paw is one of those short stories we either read or heard someone tell us about it. And so it goes overlooked. If you haven’t read it, do yourself a favor and read it. If you have read it, do yourself a favor and revisit it. It’s short, it’s available, it’s a horror classic, and it’s very likely what Stephen King had in mind when he wrote Pet Sematary. 

This final choice reprises the idea that a miner’s life was hard, though that isn’t the focus of the story. The plot sounds unpromising, but I loved Pure! Set in the time of Louis XVI, a provincial engineer is tasked with demolishing a Parisian church and relocating the bones of its graveyard. He employs a motley crew of coal miners to carry out the work as he knows they’ll have the necessary strength, stamina, and skill. One little episode that featured them stayed with me. The engineer stands on a platform to address the miners but years of crouching in narrow coal seams have bent and misshapen them so much that they can’t stand straight enough to see him. He was shocked. I wasn’t.

While some of us like to imagine humans as separate from nature, one moment where that boundary dissolves is with death. Inescapably, we will all eventually decompose and become a part of our environment. In Aaron Sach’s book, nineteenth-century Americans reckon with death through the creation of carefully landscaped cemeteries. What I particularly love about Arcadian America is how Sachs weaves his own memoir about his encounters with mortality in with the history he’s telling, making it a gripping page-turner.

I know what you’re thinking: is this really a graveyard? To be honest: Who knows?

But… there are things buried underground, so I’m including it because this is a great book. Sometimes you read something which has such a perfect idea at its core that all you can do is devour it with a curl of envy growing in your heart as you think to yourself “I really wish I’d come up with that.” The window in the ground is most definitely one of those books. 

It is.. odd. But good odd. The sort of odd where you recognise the world being described and yet is it different enough from reality to make you question what else might be hidden out there.