A Long Day at the End of the World by Brent Hendricks

by Brent Hendricks

A chilling memoir of the Tri-State Crematory incidentIn February 2002, hundreds of abandoned and decayed bodies were discovered at the Tri-State Crematory in rural Georgia, making it the largest mass desecration in modern American history. The perpetrator—a well-respected family man and a former hometown football star—had managed to conceal the horror for five years. Among the bodies found at the Tri-State Crematory was that of Brent Hendricks’s father. To quell the psychic disturbance surrounding the desecration, Hendricks embarked on a pilgrimage to the crematory site in Georgia. In A Long Day at the End of the World, he reveals his very complicated relationship with the South as he tries to reconcile his love-hate feelings for the culture with his own personal and familial history there, and his fascination with the disturbed landscape. In achingly beautiful prose, Hendricks explores his fraught relationship with his father—not just the grief that surrounded his death but the uncanniness of his resurrection. It’s a story that’s so heart-wrenching, so unbelievable, and so sensational that it would be easy to tell it without delving deep. But Hendricks’s inquiry is unrelenting, and he probes the extremely difficult questions about the love between a parent and a child, about the way human beings treat each other—in life and in death—and about the sanctity of the body. It’s the perfect storm for a true Southern Gothic tale.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, True Crime, Biography, Biography Memoir, History, Grief

Paperback

First published March 12, 2013

About the author

Brent Hendricks is a graduate of the University of Virginia, Harvard Law School, and the MFA program at the University of Arizona. He is the author of a book of poems, Thaumatrope, and has been published in such places as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, Conjunctions, The Southern Review, and Bomb magazine. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 2 out of 5]

In 2002, three hundred and thirty something bodies were found on the property around a crematorium in Georgia. They were in various stages of decay. They were stacked four or five in coffins. They were in the lake. The owner of the crematorium inexplicably just didn't cremate the remains of about a third of the deceased put in his care. He filled urns with mixtures of animal bones, some human cremains, concrete dust and other things.

One of the bodies left laying around in the yard was the author's father. A man who had been dead for seven years when his wife decided to have his body exhumed and sent for cremation instead of being left to rot in the ground with the worms. For five years his body was left with three hundred others.

Sounds interesting, right?

But the book isn't mostly about the mass desecration of human bodies, well it is, but that is used a springboard in to a whole bunch of rambling and disjointed territories.

You may notice that I gave the book two stars, and it's a weird two stars. Hendricks can fucking write. He's got a great style to him, but the book is a mess. He has a poet's ear and it shows, but he also has the flaky whimsical, “Oh, I thought it so it must be important and true since it sounds good” that also seems to plague some poets. I feel like sort of a dick giving a book about someone dealing with their loss, I mean I can't imagine what I'd feel like if eleven years from now I got a phone call telling me that my dad was rotting in some woods in Southern Vermont and that what we thought was in the urn was really concrete dust (well I would think it was a pretty good joke outside of the obvious horror, being that his livelihood was concrete, throw in parts of an incinerated Volvo and I'd say you maybe captured his essence), but, well just because you have had a loss in your life doesn't mean you get to write a good book.

The book is roughly about the author driving from where he lived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama (Thanks, Anthony! If only wasn't so lazy to leaf through the book to look this up, or have some magical machine where I type something in to a window like, "Where do the Crimson Tide play" and it would give me the answer.in whatever town it is that the Crimson Tide play out of) to where the crematorium was located in Georgia to see the land after the clean up had been done and the land was vacated of it's living and dead inhabitants.

Driving through the South we learn that the author can't fold a flag properly (really? Sorry the Eagle Scout in thinks this is something similar to being told that an adult can't hold a fork properly and get food into his mouth, but then I have to remember that most people had non-loser childhoods where they didn't learn shit like this). We learn about his childhood and that maybe he never really loved his father. We learn that once when he cried during a baseball game because the pitcher was throwing too fast the next morning his dad beamed him with baseballs repeatedly to teach him the difference between hurt and injury (I, on the other hand was really good at getting hit by balls and pucks flying at fairly high kid level velocities). We learn about his hatred of man made lakes, his disgust with the South. We get a weird simplistic history lesson of the Civil War . We learn about De Soto and his atrocities. We learn about extinct species made by man-made lakes. We learn snippets of his father's past. We learn that the author doesn't like shopping centers or big box stores. We are treated to a rant against mindless consumerism. We learn that he lived in Portland, hung out in dive bars with musicians and writers drinking Pabst before it was cool (which by the time line puts him in Portland around 2002, which I think Portland was already cool then). We learn that the author plays really lose with the term alchemy. We hear a lot that his dad being exhumed makes him like Lazarus. We get a lot of 'interesting' takes on Biblical themes, some very liberal interpretations and indignant responses that I guess are supposed to offset him against the Biblical Fundamentalists who take the Bible as a literal text. Too much of the Bible stuff that he rambles on about sound like stuff that a stoned high schooler might come up with and think he is being deep.

Interspersed with these well-written but kind of uncomfortable asides are the story about the crematorium and the bodies. It all does come kind of together but it's in a mishmash of White Liberal guilt mixed with egotistical solipsism and I just left me wondering, why? I get that it was a cathartic experience for the author, and that he felt a closure or closeness to his father that had been missing by going on this pilgrimage of sorts but it's all played with such a grandiose megalomania. For someone who makes a point repeatedly of saying that he's not religious, and mocks the rapture believing Fundamentalists and believes we are all just organic matter being controlled by chemicals doing their thing he goes (in what I'm sure is a poetical way) in to some real batshit crazy territory and places just about everything that happens in a universe where he is the dead center of. It's like a Book of Revelation for baby boomers who can't believe that the world will go on without them.

Come Armageddon, Come.

This was one I really thought that I would like. If I had lost the book at about page 100 I probably would have liked it a lot more. I could have imagined it would turn out to be something more interesting than it turned out to be

[Taylor · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you look at the things I list as interests on my GR profile, this book has basically all of them: "Magical Realism, Narrative Non-Fiction, Mystery and Crime, Travel, Geography-specific genres (i.e. Southern Gothic, the American West/Westerns), and pretty much anything that has soul or makes me cry." So this should be up my alley, right? It ends up holding true to the old saying about too much of a good thing, in that it felt like Hendricks was trying to do way too much here.

The story is and should be inherently fascinating. Hendricks' father was found at the Tri-State Crematorium, famous for a case a few years ago where it was discovered that the proprietor, Brent Marsh, was leaving bodies lying around the property in mass graves and metal lockers instead of actually cremating them (well, he cremated some bodies, but not all). Hendricks' father was one of the bodies left laying around. Hendricks weaves a tale about his father's death and the sort of limbo he's left in by not having been cremated (oh, and having been dug up from his initial burial by Hendricks' mother, who didn't want to be buried with her husband in their joint plot because the idea of being eaten by worms freaked her out - which, fair).

On top of the story about Tri-State Crematorium and his father's death and on-going deadness, he weaves in bits about history, religion, the experience of living in the south, etc., and it just begins to feel unwieldy, the connections he draws are thin and reaching at times, and it just distracts from the real meat of the story. I eventually began to skim the parts that weren't directly related to his story. I couldn't emotionally connect with Hendricks, and the various deviations felt like his own way of putting his own emotions at bay - and I think I'd rather he'd just bared his soul and done the deeper dive. He doesn't even really get that deep into his relationship with his father beyond to give a few examples of their relationship as it evolved through sports activities. It kind of stops there. If he wanted to digress without getting too entrenched in his own emotional trauma, then maybe just stick to the incident and instead do more research on the Tri-State matter, interviews with other families or something... I don't know. It felt like he didn't have enough for a book about Tri-State so he just threw in some other random bits to try to flesh it out, and I wonder if maybe that's the case, if maybe this should've been a novella or a long newspaper feature instead of a full book.

On top of the insanity of the story, the writing is beautiful, which is why it was a bit disappointing to not have found it more powerful, but I just wanted more.

[Laura · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book would have made a lovely POV article in the Living section of the Sunday paper but as a book it was tedious. I live in GA and remember the Ray Brent Marsh crematory scandal and how devastated the families were when the scandal was revealed. I was hoping to learn more about how the author's family was affected and while that is addressed in this book, you also have to wade through the author's many tangents regarding Revelations and the explorer de Soto. While those tangents are relevant to the story, they are distracting in a way that really takes away from the book. I do, however, hope the author and his family have found some peace.

[Chris Cole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting read about a man’s pilgrimage to the Tri-State Crematory, where in 2002 hundreds of bodies were found decomposing in vaults, coffins and scattered randomly in the woods. One of those bodies was the author’s father, and when his body was finally identified, it marked his father’s “third death.” The circumstances surrounding his father’s journey in death are nearly as fascinating as the details of Crematory itself. Nearly.

Gets a little in the philosophical weeds in the last half, but still a good read. I’d give it 3.5 stars.

[Kelsey Dangelo-Worth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brent Hendricks’ father was exhumed by his mother and sent to the Tri-State Crematorium to be cremated and to abate her fear of “death by worms”. Years later, the largest mass-desecration (so shocking that there were no laws to prevent it) in modern America is discovered on the grounds of the crematorium. Hundreds of bodies, including that of Brent Hendricks’ father, are found in the woods, lake, and vaults of the crematorium. Brent, a poet and writer, embarks on a historical, cultural, and botanical pilgrimage to the site of his father’s second semi-resting place, looking back on his relationship with his father, as well as his religious ideas about the afterlife and fate. He looks at the Gothic, twisted history of the South, as well as Apocalyptic (from Revelations to modern science) visions of the end of the world. Hendricks weaves together American history (deSoto, the Native Americans on the Trail of Tears, race relations, the Civil War, and modern urbanization), personal narrative (stories of his father the amateur photographer and IBM management who moved his family rootlessly around the country, even in death), personal mythology (the “Shit Fairy” that seems to strike the family, his apocalyptic visions), forensic report of the crematorium horrors, and poetry at its best: searching for answers and understanding, trying to interpret God’s meaning in the stories he writes with our lives and deaths. Particularly poignant are his points on flowers that are first to grow in disturbed land, but my favorite is his point about his father being in Tri-states of metaphysical being).

Personally, the book enthralled me. On the one hand, much of it felt like something I wrote for my Personal Mythology for the Psych Soc course I just took (though, certainly not as exciting), but similar: trying to understand the poetry of the universe through life experiences. (Though, granted, I don’t whine about my parents and look down on them.) Certainly, part of me was enthralled and horrified by the horror and tragedy of what happened at the crematorium. I couldn’t put the book down because I desperately wanted to know more, to understand how so horrible a thing could happen, and if things were ok in the end (of course, they are not).

But more so, I think this was an issue that is close to me. I have a weird relationship with death. I grew up playing in a cemetery. It still is one of my most favorite places. When I was a kid, I was fat and nerdy, stuck up in my head. When I was once asked to design a gravestone for myself, I didn’t want to because I didn’t care where my body went. When I got older, came out of my head and shell and lost weight and started living life, I became more fond of my body, more appreciative of it, and realized that your body really is a part of your soul and your identity. Futhermore, I’ve lost people to death and known death, and I fear it more. A body is just a body. But that is saying something. My mother wants to be just composted. That’s fine. But, I want my mom composted somewhere nice, where I can visit. I don’t want her body tossed in a shed to rot like she is garbage. She’s not garbage; she’s compost. That is the body of the woman that gave me hugs when I needed them, the voice that comforted me, the eyes I inherited. How could anything be more sacred?

In Victorian days, we were all right there with death. People took pictures of the dead. People were with the dead. It is appropriate that Hendricks brings up the Civil War (how can you talk about the South without bringing up the Civil War?), as this was the first time in American history that people were removed from their families at death, where bodies were not brought home, where people did not view the dead. Many of the embalming and mortician practices were started at this time so that families could view the bodies. Now, as Hendricks notes, we don’t want to see.


In fact, Hendricks makes the ingenious connection between the ancient Greek story of Hector, the Greek hero dragged behind Achilles in retribution, and the horror it elicited from his family. This honorable dishonor hits at the very soul of humans dealing with death. A body is just a body. And yet, throughout history, men have given their lives for the bodies of others. Men have certainly given their lives for much less. The South is no stranger to this. A culture of honor and violence, a culture descended from herd and clan cultures in Europe, the South is (and I recently read an article on a Sociology Psychological study on this) more prone to resort to violence when “honor” is involved. This is a way to settle differences, particularly in upsets of culture (from slavery to Civil Rights).

Hendricks makes a fascinating connection between this Southern history and culture to his own obsession with the Apocalypse. The End of the World and the South’s culture being Gone With the Wind, it isn’t a far leap. Not when Southern writers, both gothic and grotesque, have lived in the wake of the fall of a flawed world and written, desperately trying to understand the post-apocalyptic world. The South is a fascinating stew of religion and post-Civil War, that faces the emptiness and commercialism of the North. In that is bred the greatest American authors: Faulkner (who wrote of warped, Shakespearean families/dynasties), O’Conner (who loved the Grotesque and was a devout Catholic), and Lee (who wrote of justice and honor).

We can’t escape the reality that our bodies are part of our souls. We are our bodies. They are how our souls experience life. Is there a bit of truth in that they are the way that we experience death?

Is a body just a thing? It’s a Catch 22. If yes, then you must put a stress on the spirit it houses. Therefore, to desecrate the house is to deny the specialness of the soul. If we are our body, the same holds true. The author sees the body only as flesh housing chemical conscience—a thing, a symbol, but he can’t keep the images out of his mind. That is because symbols are that powerful to us.

Bodies and the treatment of them is a sacred duty part of human identity from millennia ago. We are aware of our own mortality, how can we not treat the dead a certain way?

Although I devoured and couldn’t put the book down for hours, until it was completed, it haunted (predictably) my dreams and my thoughts for days. It was not an uncomfortable haunting, though. It was a haunting of themes that have fascinated me and evolved my entire life.

(I have a degree in American literature. One of my favorite courses I took was Southern lit, taught by a dude that got his doctorate in Southern lit. One of my favorite authors is Flannery O’Connor. I teach the American Civil War, which is one of my most favorite and most fascinated time periods in history. I love/am obsessed with cemeteries and death. I just took a course in Soc Psych and wrote my own personal mythology and analysis of the symbols of my own life. The greatest present my parents ever got me was a cemetery plot.)

The greatest sadness of human experience is that we are flesh, and we lose those that are made of flesh, and all of that is so incredibly, terribly painful.

The book captured that in its most real, most beautiful, most human, and most unreal. Grade: A

“…that he internally rationalized his actions by focusing on the fact that the bodies only ‘belonged to dead people.’”
“he looked past the sanctity of flesh toward something else. Some deeper focus.”
“And this was a guy who seemed destined for upheavel from the beginning, when that smooth water drowned his first home. This was a guy whom fate (dressed up as the Shit Fairy) had marked for special and afflicted treatment, whose bones would later lie muddled in a blighted place, where honeysuckle and thistles bloomed seasonally along the banks of a fake lake.”
“A body was just a body in death. It was a thing, disconnected forever from all but its thingness.”
“According to Saint Paul, the actual phenomenon of time is different as it approaches an end point. It contracts. It piles up on itself like a train wreck. Increasingly, events from the past take on symbolic quality, and then those events come crashing into the presents loaded with meaning. I like to think of it like this way: In the End, everything feels like déjà vu.”
“When I first thought about the name ‘Tri-State as it related to my Father’s death, I thought of that other vegetation myth’s tripartite scheme; I thought of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It seem relevant in a way I couldn’t figure out. But after a while, I realized that the word had a different meaning beyond the obvious proximity of a Georgia crematory to the borders of Alabama and Tennessee. It also described another state of being, a kind of purgatory. When my father was buried and then raised up into his second death, he really did enter a third state: the plane of restlessness that haunts the road between life and death. Tri-State.”
“The first transcended religion and cut across all demographics. It was about the body itself. Some living bodies had been close to those once-living bodies. They were loves, daughters, sons, fathers, and mothers of those bodies. They’d participated in the special human bond of touch, intimacy of the social animal that made its indelible impression on our primate brains. Now those bodies were dead, and that was hard enough. And now they were separated from those bodies, and that was harder still. But to think of their people as lost among the others at the Tri-State Crematory, in the myriad and awful fashions arranged by Brent Marsh, was a dark thing indeed. Such transgression affect humans terribly, changing them forever at their core.”

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is such a great book. I just read it again to teach in my “Georgia Surreal”-themed class. It’s a poignant and at times beautiful reflection on death, grief, trauma, and apocalypse.

[Sally Kilpatrick]

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about this book. If you are looking for more information about the Tri-State Crematory, then this probably isn't the book for you. This one is a memoir, more about one man's struggle to reconcile himself with how his father was one of the abandoned bodies there. Even though a memoir, the author is a poet, and it shows. The story isn't linear but is punctuated with vivid imagery. If you like poetry, then I'd bet you would like the author's style.

[Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Kind man.

[Becky · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book wasn't exactly what I was expecting. I thought it would have more of a focus on the crimes at the Tri-State Crematory and maybe even more family history regarding author Brent Hendricks. However, the info on those topics was rather limited. The book included quite a bit of history on the area (and by history, I mean the long-ago history of explorer/conquistador Hernando de Soto). This historic aspect didn't seem to fit with the modern stories of the author's father and the Tri-State Crematory.

Honestly, it read a bit like the author had a solid long-form essay but needed to pad it in order to make it book-length, so he added the parts about de Soto.

2.5 stars

[Collin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hadn't heard of the Tri-State Crematory Incident before now. At the very real risk of sounding insensitive at best and heartlessly cruel at worst, I was pretty delighted at the subject matter. It's not often where you get true crime + body horror without an insane amount of murder. This was just the right blend of gruesome and... I don't know, not-murdery. Anyway.

It's not just about the Crematory Incident, though. It's about Hendricks's Opinions and Beliefs and Feelings. This book reminded me of how it feels to read John Green or Maggie Stiefvater - you start out thinking, "Oh, man, they know how to write a story," but then it gets further and you realize, "Oh, heck, they just really like hearing themselves talk and thinking that they sound smart."

Why Hendricks thought this memoir was the place for tearing down "the South," I don't know. It's not even that I disagree with him. Guys, did you know slavery was bad, and that Southern Christians weren't universally helpful during the Civil Rights Movement? Hendricks thinks you don't know, and he reminds you every thirty pages or so. It reeks of white guilt (especially paired with his desperation for having a single Cherokee ancestor in the 1800s, and choosing to believe he did have one against all reasonable evidence to the contrary - what) and honestly, why? Isn't "300+ bodies were decaying behind a crematory in Georgia and my father was one of them" enough for one memoir? And I don't even want to get into his rambling about the End Times, like he's the only one in this Consumeristic Modern World thinking about the end of days.

I truly don't know why a hipster from Portland thought writing a memoir whose subtitle might as well have been "The South Sucks (And My Estranged Dad Is Dead)". Am I little on the defensive because I am from the south? Sure, I own that. But it's not like people don't write these kinds of books about other places, and they always confuse me. Why do you want to take a dump on someone's hometown just to make sure everyone knows you're not racist, or because you want to pen some derivative modern jeremiad and Tuscaloosa, undergoing some construction on the day you drove through, happened to be a handy target?

I'm giving it a three, though, because the parts that were ACTUALLY about the Crematory Incident were chilling and really, really well-written. The strained relationship between father and son was presented in the most hackneyed melodrama style, but the incident itself was something else. It's something I'm actually interested in looking up a bit more now.

[Kayla]

I’m assuming this was incredibly therapeutic to write. Very thoughtful, almost to a fault, where some of the extraneous classical/biblical/etc tie-ins could have been shaved down a tiny bit, imo. I skimmed past those parts. I guess maybe I was expecting more true crime ish but it makes sense that it isn’t really.

[Brett buckner · Rating 2 out of 5]

This isn’t what I was hoping for. I was thinking this would be true crime, but it’s more travelogue and philosophical musings about End Times, slavery, dads, and earthquakes.

Very well written, but just not as deep as the author perhaps wanted it to be.

[Elizabeth Schurman · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is pretty creepy as expected. A spiritual journey as well as a confrontation of disturbing physical realities.

[Kris · Rating 1 out of 5]

When I first read that someone had written a memoir related to the Tri-State Crematory incident, in which a crematorium operator abandoned over 300 bodies on his property rather than disposing of them, I hate to admit I did a grisly little happy dance, because I'd been fascinated with this story when it broke. So it was to be intermingled with a memoir? All the better, I thought.

I thought.

I don't know why I finished this book, except for sheer dogged refusal to be defeated by it, but the story was perilously little related to the Tri-State debacle, and the memoir is possibly the most disappointing I've ever read. (In 40 years at about 200 to 300 books a year recently, that's saying something.) It turned out to be just one more story about a son and his father and his father's death and his father had been unfeeling or uncaring and was mean to him in his youth and I'VE READ EVERY BIT OF THIS STORY BEFORE, AND BETTER. If you're going to write a memoir, you should be warned that those of us who read the likes of Pat Conroy and Jeannette Walls and Anne Lamott are used to a pretty high standard for family stories and you're going to have to measure up. In absolutely no way did I find any part of the father/son portion of the memoir remotely interesting: it was something to be suffered through while waiting for the author to get around to writing about Tri-State again.

There's more -- or, I should say, less. Along with the unsatisfying memoir, the author tries to mix in stories of De Soto in early America, the Trail of Tears and some long-lost relative, lots of Confederate flags and religious signs throughout the south (gee, we've never heard any of that before), the rapture, and... I seriously cannot go on. It was a maddening, frustrating, disappointing book on every possible level, irritating to me as a southerner, a writer, and the grim, creepy soul that's still horribly fascinated by the crematory story that was NOMINALLY at the heart of this book.

Luckily it was short, although I will probably continue to berate myself for the next few days about spending a few hours reading this when I could've started something immensely more enjoyable, which means almost any of the other 8 books in my library stack. Don't let this happen to you.

[Aaron McQuiston · Rating 1 out of 5]

I still have about 50 pages left of this book, and even though I'm not going to finish it until tonight, I can give a fair assessment of this memoir. It's a hunk of shit. It takes a story that could be interesting and appealing (The Tri-State Crematory dumped over 300 bodies on the ground instead of cremating them and Brent Hendricks father was one of them) and turns it into a scattered, unsatisfying, poorly written and conceived path through the journey of mourning. I started with sympathy for Hendricks for the things that he had been through with this scandal, but the longer I read, the sympathy slowly fades away because his personality becomes irritating and his views on environmental issues, the apocalypse, and Revelations are not wrong but they don't really fit in with the story of his father. It is almost like he uses this tragedy as a pedestal for his political beliefs, and of course he is one of those people who has the ability the point out problems without any ideas of solution. In the end, it feels like a mismanaged idea, a editing job where the editor worked and worked and finally just said, "Fuck it. I can't polish this turd." In the end, with a flop of a book they published, FSG got some good people to write blurbs on the cover (I mean with Peter Buck from REM, Kevin Brockmeier (one of my favorites) and Joy Williams, you would think that it would be much better), and hoped for the best. I don't recommend this tedious journey to everyone.

[Holly · Rating 3 out of 5]

When I venture into the Deep South I need a guide, someone to hold my hand and whisper reassurances, or get me through the gates, a Virgil, or a writer who grew up there and has chosen to return and explore. Dennis Covington introduced me to the snake-handling churches of Scotch-Irish Appalachia (though two-thirds of the way through Salvation on Sand Mountain Covington went native ...). Brent Hendricks is a thoughtful, liberal, and skeptical-but-haunted guide to the Deep South. From how dismal is the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa where his wife accepted a job, to the desolation of strip-mall landscapes and regraded river bottoms, to the mystery of why a crematory operator chose to abandon and desecrate bodies instead of incinerating them. I was fascinated by Hendricks's quest for existential answers (it is not a book about a crime investigation), although mid-way through I began to fear he wasn't going to ask some of the questions I wanted to ask (about the meaning of bodies and the dualistic relation of the self to the body, for example). Then, in his own time, in this narrative that defies expectations, he did address that question as well as others that were equally compelling but that hadn't occurred to me (hurray for reading nonfiction that broadens my consciousness).

[Bobby · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those books that when I walked into the bookstore, I had no intention of buying or reading. I read the back cover of the book (the author is wearing an Atlanta Braves baseball cap, my favorite team, and there's a blurb written by Peter Buck of the band R.E.M., one of my all time favorite bands). I thought, "This looks like an interesting book," bought it, and am glad I did.

I grew up in northwest Georgia not far from the location of the Tri-State Crematory. This book is about growing up in the South (a place I absolutely love, but also a place much about which I equally hate); the father/son, mother/son relationship; the angst of one's teenage years; and an existential questioning of one's existence.

I absolutely loved this book and am quite pleased that I happened to stumble across it completely by accident.

[Joan · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the most unusual books I have ever read. I think the author needed to make a decision on what he was writing about. He had several threads, but none were complete. A few of them are:
*His hate of the South and everything it stands for.
*His father's death
*His father's non burial and the things that happened at the cemetery.
*Exploration by DeSoto.
*The rivers that were turned into lakes using damns and the extinction of snails and flowers.
*Trying to connect the bodies left unburied in the cemetery and his father's early home that was flooded to create a lake.

I think had the author selected on or two themes, he would have had a better story. As it is, the book has too many unanswered questions. I did not enjoy it at all.

[Rebecca Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hendricks, who is most often associated with writing poetry, brings a lovely yet disturbing lyricism to a very bizarre story. His father's body was sent to a crematorium in Georgia, but for inexplicable reasons, the caretaker there decided not to cremate these remains or several others that arrived over a period of several years. Eventually, this grotesque circumstance was discovered and the grisly tale hit national headlines with a splash, and the personal connection Hendricks had with this story launched him into a lengthy, not-always healthy musing about the notion of "unsettled earth" in the Deep South as well as in the human psyche. Curious, apocalyptic, not always successful, but undeniably intriguing.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A coworker told me about this book. I remember reading about the 'troubles' at Tri State Crematory in GA and was intrigued at this one family's story. Frankly I had hoped that it would have more information about the investigation into the desecration of all the bodies and what happened to those working at the crematory but this is more of a 'memoir'-one son's search for the father who was dead and then somehow back in his life due to this disaster. Certainly not the best book I've ever read but I needed a diversion from the latest Ken Follett

[Leslie Zampetti · Rating 2 out of 5]

The reviewer Greg sums it up - you feel like a heel giving this book a two-star rating. After all, it is a haunting & personal memoir of his father's body being found at the Tri-State Crematory mass desecration.

But it is also a self-indulgent road trip through one man's obsessions. As poetry, it is beautiful. As memoir, it is disturbing. But as true crime or literary nonfiction, it is rambling, confused, and even a little dull.

[Kristine · Rating 3 out of 5]

In 2002 hundreds of bodies were discovered abandoned at the Tri-State Crematory in rural Georgia.
The author shares his experience of searching for the body of his father and his mother wonders whose ashes she has been speaking to for the
past 5 years.

[Kelsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a beautifully written journey through dealing with death, in this case multiple times. It embraces the madness that comes with loss and comes out the other side. All in all a worthy read.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that crosses boundaries, combining elegiac poetry, amateur sleuthing and true crime detection, this slim non-fiction work is compelling from the first sentence... actually, from the cover. Unique, original, and all those other words that mean in a category of its own.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

very visceral and haunting....thoroughly enjoyed reading it

[Thankful · Rating 4 out of 5]

This provided one man's (and his family's) interesting view into the Tri-State Crematory incident. Though there will never be answers, this was worth the read.

[Bojan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating and well written. Hendricks maintains a tension throughout the memoir that is both admirable and haunting.