Overbooked Book Lists

Six Feet Under Booklist

Page Modified: June 19, 2009

Titles (fiction and nonfiction) about death, undertakers and undertaking. Inspired by the HBO show Six Feet Under.

• Final Arrangements by Miles Keaton Andrew
  2002
  Focusing on America's undertaker's industry, this clever first novel is rich with dialogue and full of nuanced characters.
• Murder in the Hearse Degree by Tim Cockey
  2003
  The fourth installment in the popular hearse mystery series featuring Hitchcock Sewell, the lovable "undertaker-detective readers will really dig" (People). When a pregnant nanny turns up quite dead, Hitch suspects foul play and embarks on a quest to find her killer.
  
• Hearse Case Scenario by Tim Cockey
  2002
  Hitch is up to his ears in murders, and the latest clues point to a Baltimore nightclub. Following his nose, Hitch uncovers a host of nefarious goings-on as well as some downright strange characters, including a felonious artist, a Miles Davis wanna-be, an Ida Lupino look-alike, and one very irritated dance instructor.
• Hearse of a Different Color by Tim Cockey
  2001
  A surprise blizzard dumps more than snow on the steps of Sewell & Sons Funeral Home--it leaves behind the corpse of a murdered waitress. As amateur detective Hitchcock Sewell investigates, his TV meteorologist girlfriend sees this as a chance to move into hard news. But her unctuous mentor wants to beat Hitch to the punch.
• The Hearse You Came In On by Tim Cockey
  2000
  Hitchcock Sewell, Baltimore's most eligible undertaker, is bemused by an alluring mystery woman who arrives at his funeral home in a tennis dress and wants to talk about her own arrangements. Hitch's growing obsession soon draws him into a string of increasingly life-threatening circumstances -- including murder. And if he's not careful, Hitch will find himself six feet under.
  
• Shrouded by Carol Anne Davis
  1997
• The Mortician's Apprentice by Rick DeMarinis
  1994
  
• Dirt by Sean Doolittle
  2001
  "Elmore Leonard meets [Evelyn Waugh's] The Loved One in Sean Doolittle's wildly entertaining first novel. Dirt excavates the many facets of the human soul. You'll find love, greed, and grief in these pages ... along with bullets and action to spare."
  —Norman Partridge, Author of The Ten Ounce Siesta
• The Divine Ryans by Wayne Johnston
  1990/1999
  The youngest member of an eccentric Irish-Catholic family in the dual business of newspaper-publishing and undertaking, nine-year-old Doyle must deal with ghostly appearances, his screwy relatives, and his own burgeoning sexuality.
• The Unnatural by David Prill
  1995
  "The Unnatural is a natural, and terribly funny. It's weird and bizarre and outre, and awfully funny. It's uniquie, original, off the wall, profound and dark and laugh-out-loud funny. Death hasn't been taken for such a merry-go-round romp since The Loved One, and I think Prill's The Unnatural is funnier." - Kate Wilhelm
• Dark Undertakings by Rebecca Tope
  1999/2001
  Although everyone is convinced that 55-year-old Jim Lapsford died from a heart attack, trainee undertaker Drew Slocombe suspects foul play, especially when he finds out Lapsford left behind not only a long-suffering wife but also a series of scorned mistresses.
• The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh
  1948
  Inspired by a trip to California, The Loved One tells the story of a love triangle set against an ironic and macabre backdrop: a funeral home for Hollywood's departed greats.

Nonfiction

• Grave Matters: A Journey Through the Modern Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial
  Author: Harris, Mark
  Publisher: Scribner $ 24 ISBN: 9780743277686 Date: 2007
  PW Booklist
  The first book ever written about "green" burials follows the fast-moving trend that embraces affordable, personal, eco-friendly alternatives to the highly toxic, mass-produced modern method.
  Updated 1.16.06
• And a Time To Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life
  Author: Kaufman, Sharon R.
  Publisher: Scribner $ 28 ISBN: 0743264762 Date: 2005
  PW LJ
  A penetrating examination of how most Americans die today--how the patients and their families' conflicting desires about a "good death" collide with the politics and routines of American hospitals.
  Updated 3.11.05
• Rest in Peace: A Cultural History of Death and the Funeral Home in Twentieth-Century America by Gary Laderman
  2003
  Drawing upon interviews with funeral directors, major historical events like the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Rudolf Valentino, films, television, newspaper reports, and other primary sources, Rest in Peace cuts through the rhetoric to show the reality of the American funeral.
  
• Bodies in Motion and at Rest: On Metaphor and Mortality by Thomas Lynch
  2000
  A poet and funeral director continues to examine the relationship between the "literary and mortuary" arts in essays speaking to the existentials: between being human and ceasing to be, between birth and death, we are bodies in motion and at rest.
  
• Still Life in Milford: Poems by Thomas Lynch
  1998
  This collection of poems by the highly acclaimed author of The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade engages the full register of the poet's voice--as elegist, witness, obituarist, straight man, and passerby--to achieve a disturbing and instructive harmony.
• The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade by Thomas Lynch
  1997
  Like all poets inspired by death, Thomas Lynch is, unlike others, also hired to bury the dead or to cremate them and to tend to their families in a small Michigan town where he serves as funeral director. In this book, Lynch, poet to the dying, names the hurts and whispers the condolences and shapes the questions posed by the familiar mystery known as death.
• Round-Trip to Deadsville: A Year in the Funeral Underground by Tim Matson
  2000
  When it hit him that he wouldn't live forever, Matson decided to build his own coffin and set out on the road, where he encountered an cabal of mysterious characters who populate the funeral underground: a gravedigger, undertaker, organist, florist and cremator. His memoir takes readers on a tour of the Big Question of death, offering both chills and laughs along the way.
  
• American Way of Death Revisited by Jessica Mitford
  1999
  This revised edition contains completely new chapters on prepayment and the new multinational corporations, as well as a look at the failure of the Federal Trade Commission to enforce laws the original edition of this book helped bring about.
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  2003
  Kirkus PW
  In her droll, intimate voice, Roach conducts an oddly compelling, often hilarious forensic exploration of the strange lives of bodies postmortem.
  Updated 2.24.03
  

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