5 star Book Shelfie review
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Book Review by Maria Ashford
In “Living Life with Death”, Sarah Jones offers readers a front-row seat to one of the most guarded and least spoken-of professions in the modern world—the death industry. But this is not some macabre freakshow nor a voyeuristic descent into the grotesque. It is an engaging work of unflinching creative non-fiction, where the author strips back not just the formaldehyde-scented veil over death, but the psychic armour she’s built from years of exposure to it. The result is a memoir that is as tender as it is chilling, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.
Jones doesn’t merely imaging working with the dead—she’s really lived among them. Her ten years working as a body recovery technician, tissue harvester, and autopsy assistant are laid out here in short, sharp vignettes that land like gut punches. From pulling charred bodies from fire-ravaged homes to harvesting the corneas of a child, each chapter is a self-contained meditation on mortality—and how proximity to death reshapes the soul.
It’s refreshing to see Jones not merely recount her experiences, but craft them with a distinctive literary flair. Rather than defaulting to the tired conventions of the memoir genre—overwrought sentimentality, linear chronology, or therapeutic oversharing—she experiments boldly with tone, form, and voice. The result is a book that feels less like a traditional memoir and more like a curated mosaic of moments.
What makes this book worth reading is the author’s distinct voice: direct, darkly funny, and emotionally precise. Jones doesn’t try to prettify the details. She describes maggot-infested corpses, spurting wounds, and melting cadavers with the cool eye of someone who has seen too much to be shocked—but not so much that she can’t still feel it. Her observations land like literary shrapnel. In one passage, a post-mortem moan sends a rookie cop sprinting for the door. In another, Jones stands beside a bloated corpse and dryly recounts her partner’s sudden craving for barbecue. The horror here is not exaggerated; it is mundane. And that mundanity is what makes it terrifying. It’s the realness that gets you.
But this is not a catalogue of gore. The true attraction of “Living Life with Death” lies is both getting a visceral insight into the death industry and seeing how Jones uses her proximity to death as a lens through which to explore human nature. The corpses are constant, but what lingers are the living: the mother whispering goodbye to her son before he’s wheeled away; the colleagues cracking dark jokes to survive another shift; the author herself, collapsing into grief mid-procedure as she handles the body of a child. And then, later, questioning why she didn’t cry at all for the next one. In those moments, we realise we’re not just reading about death—we’re reading about what it does to those who tend to it.
In a structure that mirrors the chaos of death itself, the book unfolds as a series of quick cuts and slow burns. Some chapters are a single haiku-like stanza, others stretch to more reflective narratives. One page will have you stifling laughter; the next, you’ll feel that tightening in your chest that only comes from recognising some buried, painful truth. Jones doesn’t offer easy answers or redemptive epiphanies. Instead, she sits in the discomfort and lets us feel it with her.
There is something quintessentially Stephen King-esque in the book’s approach. It’s not the supernatural horror of The Shining, but the existential horror of Pet Sematary—the dread of knowing that the things which kill us are not evil spirits or ancient curses, but trucks on highways, unchecked despair, and the fragility of our own bodies. Like King, Jones knows that the real terror lives in what is ordinary. And in between, the awkward pauses at dinner dates where her job becomes too much for a would-be suitor to stomach.
In the end, “Living Life with Death” is about the human necessity of looking into the abyss—and the toll it takes to do so for a living. It’s about how you carry that weight home. How it creeps into your parenting, your relationships, your sense of self. It’s a reminder that someone, somewhere, is always bearing witness to the worst moment of someone else’s life—and then quietly picking up the pieces.
This isn’t a book for every reader. At times it’s graphic, unfiltered, and emotionally direct. But for those willing to follow Jones through the realities of her work, it offers a compelling, insightful, and surprisingly original reading experience and insight into the death industry.
https://book-shelfie.com/review/livin...
Book Review by Maria Ashford
In “Living Life with Death”, Sarah Jones offers readers a front-row seat to one of the most guarded and least spoken-of professions in the modern world—the death industry. But this is not some macabre freakshow nor a voyeuristic descent into the grotesque. It is an engaging work of unflinching creative non-fiction, where the author strips back not just the formaldehyde-scented veil over death, but the psychic armour she’s built from years of exposure to it. The result is a memoir that is as tender as it is chilling, as hilarious as it is heartbreaking.
Jones doesn’t merely imaging working with the dead—she’s really lived among them. Her ten years working as a body recovery technician, tissue harvester, and autopsy assistant are laid out here in short, sharp vignettes that land like gut punches. From pulling charred bodies from fire-ravaged homes to harvesting the corneas of a child, each chapter is a self-contained meditation on mortality—and how proximity to death reshapes the soul.
It’s refreshing to see Jones not merely recount her experiences, but craft them with a distinctive literary flair. Rather than defaulting to the tired conventions of the memoir genre—overwrought sentimentality, linear chronology, or therapeutic oversharing—she experiments boldly with tone, form, and voice. The result is a book that feels less like a traditional memoir and more like a curated mosaic of moments.
What makes this book worth reading is the author’s distinct voice: direct, darkly funny, and emotionally precise. Jones doesn’t try to prettify the details. She describes maggot-infested corpses, spurting wounds, and melting cadavers with the cool eye of someone who has seen too much to be shocked—but not so much that she can’t still feel it. Her observations land like literary shrapnel. In one passage, a post-mortem moan sends a rookie cop sprinting for the door. In another, Jones stands beside a bloated corpse and dryly recounts her partner’s sudden craving for barbecue. The horror here is not exaggerated; it is mundane. And that mundanity is what makes it terrifying. It’s the realness that gets you.
But this is not a catalogue of gore. The true attraction of “Living Life with Death” lies is both getting a visceral insight into the death industry and seeing how Jones uses her proximity to death as a lens through which to explore human nature. The corpses are constant, but what lingers are the living: the mother whispering goodbye to her son before he’s wheeled away; the colleagues cracking dark jokes to survive another shift; the author herself, collapsing into grief mid-procedure as she handles the body of a child. And then, later, questioning why she didn’t cry at all for the next one. In those moments, we realise we’re not just reading about death—we’re reading about what it does to those who tend to it.
In a structure that mirrors the chaos of death itself, the book unfolds as a series of quick cuts and slow burns. Some chapters are a single haiku-like stanza, others stretch to more reflective narratives. One page will have you stifling laughter; the next, you’ll feel that tightening in your chest that only comes from recognising some buried, painful truth. Jones doesn’t offer easy answers or redemptive epiphanies. Instead, she sits in the discomfort and lets us feel it with her.
There is something quintessentially Stephen King-esque in the book’s approach. It’s not the supernatural horror of The Shining, but the existential horror of Pet Sematary—the dread of knowing that the things which kill us are not evil spirits or ancient curses, but trucks on highways, unchecked despair, and the fragility of our own bodies. Like King, Jones knows that the real terror lives in what is ordinary. And in between, the awkward pauses at dinner dates where her job becomes too much for a would-be suitor to stomach.
In the end, “Living Life with Death” is about the human necessity of looking into the abyss—and the toll it takes to do so for a living. It’s about how you carry that weight home. How it creeps into your parenting, your relationships, your sense of self. It’s a reminder that someone, somewhere, is always bearing witness to the worst moment of someone else’s life—and then quietly picking up the pieces.
This isn’t a book for every reader. At times it’s graphic, unfiltered, and emotionally direct. But for those willing to follow Jones through the realities of her work, it offers a compelling, insightful, and surprisingly original reading experience and insight into the death industry.
https://book-shelfie.com/review/livin...
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