The Embalmer

by Anne-Renée Caillé, Rhonda Mullins (Translation)

Imagine rubbing shoulders with the dead for most of your life. As she picks the brain of her father for the most gruesome and thought-provoking secrets of his embalming career--from the drowned boy whose organs were eaten by eels to how to inject just the right amount of colour into a corpse's skin for that blushing look--the narrator must look her parents' deaths, and her relationship with them, straight in the eye.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Death, Novella, Canada, Translated Fiction, France

96 pages, Paperback

First published February 6, 2017

About the author

Anne-Renée Caillé est née en 1983. Depuis 2018, elle vit et enseigne à Kingston, en Ontario.

Reviews

[Vicki Herbert · Rating 1 out of 5]

I smell something rotten...

THE EMBALMER
by Anne-Renee Caille

I smell something rotten...it's interesting that no page count is given in the description of this item, which is selling for an outrageous price...

This very short booklet barely uses sentences, and I really didn't see a lot of poetry here. Just goes to show that you can call something poetry and sell it to just about anyone, and they will come away saying: Wow, I've just read something deep...

If you're really looking for a good memoir about life in the funeral business, try A LIFE IN DEATH by James Baker. That book tells a story...and it's true...and it's also very humorous...or if you're looking for something a little on the poetic side try TETHERED by Amy Mckinnon.

[♥ Sandi ❣ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars Thank you to Edelweiss and Coach House Books for allowing me to read and review this book. Published November 27, 2018.

Strange, strange little book. Written in French, but I am sure nothing is lost in the translation.

The story of a daughter who records the proliferate ramblings of her father, the undertaker. Trying to understand the reason her father was compelled to take that job in the first place. Then details of the many deaths that her father dealt with. Gruesome details of death and the many ways to preserve and reconstruct.

This sounds like a ghastly and repelling book. However, just by the way it was written, very scantily, brings the story into it's own. Not that there are not some horrific images formed while reading this, knowing that this is a non-fiction book, but nothing is dwelled upon, so both the words and the images move along quickly.

Not a book for the easily disturbed or those with a weak stomach. This is a genre that is not often written about, and is a book that will not soon be forgotten, once read.

[Pierre-Alexandre Buisson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce récit proprement fascinant, présenté en "bullet points", relate les confidences du père de l'auteur après presque trente ans comme embaumeur. Confidences sobres, respectueuses, parfois révoltantes, qui nous ouvrent une fenêtre privilégiée sur la façon des autres d'aborder la mort d'un proche.

La mort y est traitée comme une étape inévitable de la vie, clinique et descriptive. Les sujets sont morts de plein de façons, parfois naturelle, parfois carrément atroce. Je suis quelqu'un de plutôt tolérant face à l'horreur du quotidien, et j'ai grimacé à quelques reprises.

Ayant moi-même travaillé quelques temps dans le domaine funéraire, j'ai reconnu ici et là quelques situations, et j'ai été projeté le temps de ma lecture dans l'ambiance feutrée d'un laboratoire d'embaumement. J'ai aussi cru déceler une histoire ayant pour protagoniste Richard Blass.

L'écriture très précise rend bien les souvenirs du père, et on espère sincèrement que ça n'est que le début de l'aventure littéraire d'Anne-Renée Caillé.

[Aimée Verret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Même si je peux saluer une écriture sentie et un projet qui me touche, je suis restée sur ma faim. Peut-être parce que, justement, ce sujet m'interpelle vraiment (quelque chose de famille dans mon cas aussi). Les fragments sont une forme que j'apprécie en général; en fait, cela m'a ramenée avec ce livre à ma maîtrise, par cette forme quasi essayisitique. Je comprends ici qu'en touchant à la mémoire, de quelqu'un d'autre de surcroît, on souhaite rester dans l'indéfini, le partiel. Sauf que j'aurais aimé plus de chair autour de l'os (désolée pour l'humour morbide).

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narration empathique, douce et fascinante en fragments... à condition d'avoir le coeur bien accroché! Un peu d'humour noir par moment. J'ai beaucoup apprécié et j'en aurais pris davantage.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Très intéressant, belle forme!
Froid et intense.

[Audra (ouija.reads) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a haunting and introspective novella, almost poetic in form, that looks into the necessary but morbid to sometimes gruesome task of the undertaker as a daughter interviews her father—a lifelong embalmer—about his experiences, the memorable cases, the people, the bodies, the things he can’t unsee.

I think we’re all a bit fascinated by death. Fascination and repulsion go hand in hand; we want to see but we’re going to peek through our fingers, just in case. This book contemplates if even death can become mundane to those who are constantly surrounded by it. The answer, as the reader quickly finds out, is no. Death may be the ultimate ending, but while we are still around to witness it, it goes on and on offering new surprises with the multitudes of renditions it continues to offer.

The task of the embalmer is to fix the dead, make them presentable for the family to see one last time, so they can remember what their loved one looked like before they were shot in the face, drowned and chewed on by marine animals, burned to an unrecognizable degree.

This book doesn’t romanticize death—it reveals the full image behind the curtain of the mess that death can make and how we, the living, disguise it in an attempt to forget that death is coming for us too.

I’m adding this book to my growing collection of horror-adjacent reads—books that take on dark subject material but aren’t necessarily horror novels. I love these types of books.

My thanks to Coach House Books for my copy of this one to read and review.

[Christine Bergeron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ma première réflexion, quand j'ai débuté ce récit, fut : quelle drôle de forme!

Le rythme, hachuré, enfile à une vitesse hallucinante des faits rapportés par la fille d'un embaumeur. C'est simple, précis, sans flafla. Tout le style est contenu dans un verbatim en vrac, proposant des anecdotes incongrues et glauques qui nous donnent envie de lire d'une traite ce petit roman. Tellement qu'il aurait pu être beaucoup plus long. C'est à lire!

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Style d'écriture assez difficile, surtout au début. Sujet très intéressant par contre!

[Rebecca Espinoza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this book at a used book bookstore today, very short and I enjoyed :)

[TheADHDreader · Rating 2 out of 5]

Même si j'ai apprécié la forme et l'histoire, j'ai trouvé qu'il en manquait. Cette nouvelle racontant un père embaumeur, raconté par sa fille aurait pu être magnifique. Malheureusement il en manquait, aurait pu avoir un portrait plus poignant, plus émouvant si la forme avait été moins froide et sobre dans sa présentation. L'auteur à laissé peu de place à l'homme lui-même et a pris un peu trop de temps à nous le livrer. Ça m'a déçu un peu parce qu'au fond le livre est superbe.

[Julie lit pour les autres · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un solide 3.75

Dans ma quête de retourner à la lecture à la vitesse que mon corps me le permet, je farfouillais dans les rayons de mes étagères quand ce livre m’est tombé dans les mains. Je me souviens l’avoir acheté sous l’impulsion du moment. Le titre m’intriguait, le sujet tout autant.

Avant d’en débuter la lecture, j’ai lu un article où Anne-Renée Caillé expliquait la genèse du livre. Son père a travaillé comme embaumeur avant sa naissance et lorsqu’elle était toute petite. Il avait soudainement quitté cette occupation pour travailler dans les mines du nord du Québec. Comme l’autrice a appris cette information beaucoup plus tard, elle a voulu en savoir plus : son père s’est prêté à plusieurs rencontres à ce sujet.

Ces rencontres ont résulté en un tout petit livre, à peine 102 pages, qui se décline en courts chapitres. Ces coupures constantes dans le texte, il me semble, font écho à la façon dont le père de l’autrice fait le tour de « ses » morts à partir d’une liste qu’il a préparé en prévision des échanges avec sa fille.

On suit une ligne du temps qui débute dans l’enfance du père et de sa fascination soudaine – un genre de coup de foudre - pour la mort, celle des corps sans vie dont on prend soin une dernière fois, celle que l’on défie en tentant de donner de la vie à leur visage. On traverse ce passage professionnel avec lui, en regardant les corps à travers ses yeux, jusqu’à ce qu’il quitte cet univers brusquement.

C’est un livre poétique dans l’écriture et le ton : il donne une certaine lumière à la dure finalité de la vie qui se passe parfois dans la violence, dans le désespoir ou dans une absurdité incompréhensible.

C’est, je pense, ce qui m’a permis d’en faire la lecture, malgré les chocs répétés que l’on encaisse comme lectrice face aux drames qui menaient les vivants à la table de l’embaumeur. On réalise bien vite que ce n’est pas tant la mort qui nous choque : c’est cette accumulation de morts qui défilent devant nous, et surtout, les circonstances dans lesquelles elles ont eu lieu qui finissent par gruger doucement la distance que l’on peut avoir face à eux.

Un livre dérangeant, étonnant et subtil, tant pour son sujet que pour le contraste saisissant entre la légèreté de la plume de l’autrice et le poids croissant des morts.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

via my blog: https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com/
'You have to be true, to be faithful to the photograph the family sometimes leaves. I am surprised to find out this is not done consistently.'

Most of us don’t like to think about what happens after death, how the embalmer prepares the body, the work required to make our loved ones look as they did in life, our ‘last look’ at our beloved who is both present in body and yet not. In this literary fiction, Anne-Renée Caillé’s narrator plumbs the depths of her father’s experiences during his time as an embalmer. What seems like a macabre subject is handled with a far more matter of a fact manner. We modern-day people are removed from death, out of sight, out of mind. While a book of only 96 pages, some of the telling made my skin crawl, not so much for gruesome horror but that lives end in the strangest and saddest of ways.

Her father, at times with ‘a list of cases on hand’, makes some of the deceased become more real by saying their names. His job, to make them who they were before the ravages of disease, accidents, murder, or even combat had his work cut out for him, and certainly there are cases where there isn’t the possibility of make-up saving the day, because only a closed casket is the option. There are indignities in dying, most of us just have to look away and let others handle the ugly details, never once giving it a thought yet knowing our time will come. Who can bear to ponder such things with so much living to do?

“The story is sensitive, they all are, but some are more disturbing.”

Through listening to her father, she wants to understand him, his choice of jobs where things are underground. Then there is illness in her own family, in her father just like his father before him but death’s movements can’t always be tracked and sometimes surprises us with the age old question, “Who is next?”

I can’t wait to read more by Anne-Renée Caillé. She is an author I will be following. I read this in one night.

Available Now

Coach House Books

[Etienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Original, poétique, touchant et même rebutant par moment, ce livre, écrit sous forme de chroniques/anecdotes est une forme d'hommage autant à son père qu'au métier d'embaumeur. On rit, on apprend, on grimace même par moment, mais on passe un agréable moment de lecture. Un livre qui sort de l'ordinaire, qui ose et qui réussit. Une belle découverte!

[Biljana · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Embalmer is tough to describe. It is a slim and slightly odd story of a father who worked in the embalming industry and the memorable experiences that he passed onto his daughter. Each vignette is short and tells us the story of another death, usually described in a remote fashion (until we reach the end and it becomes more personal). This was a quick and enjoyable read.

"There are obviously more anonymous deaths with nothing that stands out-they aren't included here, here are the ones that stand out..."

Thanks to NetGalley, the author, and Coach House Books for the chance to read this book in exchange for a review.

[Mélina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Petit bouquin intriguant où l’autrice raconte sous format « bullet point » les souvenirs de son père, qui fut un embaumeur. Utilisant les souvenirs de ce dernier, elle nous énumère de nombreux morts qui ont été entretenus par son père. Ces 100 pages nous offrent un regard sur lés dessous d’un métier qui est dédaigné mais qui reste important pour notre société.

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

From burying rabbits to embalming the dead, a woman catalogs her family’s matter-of-fact trade with a dark poetry animated by its brevity—like life itself. God bless Canadians, because the grotesque details of this book bleed an observational gentleness.

[Rikki King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a short, poetic meditation on impermanence, what remains, what we value, and trauma. I absolutely loved it.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

First and foremost thank you very much to Netgalley and to Coach House Books for providing me with an e-arc of this book to read in exchange for an honest review. All opinions stated are my own. This book has just been released on November 24, 2018 if you’d like to pick it up.


Let me start off by saying that this is most definitely NOT a book for everyone. If you are the least bit squeamish ...I’d say let this one pass you by without taking a second look. It is blunt, there is no holding back from the storyteller nor the author, and descriptions at times are gruesome. The details are, however, the truth, which is exactly why I requested to read this book. If you have an inquiring mind such as myself , curious of the unfamiliar, the unknown, you wonder what happens to us after we die and the bodies are taken away ...then I suggest that you give “ The Embalmer” a whirl as did I. Unless you grew up in a funeral home, at least some parts of this book are bound to enlighten you. “ The Embalmer” will answer questions about death that you didn’t know you had.

For me this book fell into my hands at a seemingly perfect time. In September, after just having lost my uncle to cancer, one night I somehow ended up on YouTube researching cremation vs. burial. I have lost so many loved ones in my mere 30 years that I fully understand that your time can suddenly be up
at any given moment. I’d like to be able to make my own decision ahead of time with what happens to my body when I pass, also not leaving up to my family to have to make a incomparable decision,

After watching a tour of a crematorium and a lengthy description of THAT process, I then clicked on a mortician explaining the steps taken to not only embalm but to prepare a body for loved ones to see.
( No— there was not an actual body in the video.) Some of the stories that she tells the audience ( yes, she— I haven’t seen many women morticians either but it’s refreshing) are quite horrific, as they are in this book. No spoilers here —I will leave it up to you all to decide whether you’d like to hear them or not. Needless to say, after seeing and hearing all the grim details of that must be done to our bodies after death, their salaries could never pay enough for me to stomach it. As stated here , “Makeup is only the surface, the finale.”

As far as some feedback for the author, since this is her first novel: I give this book 5 stars, with zero regrets. More people should become aware of this type of information because there is plenty of it out there. One of my best friends in high school, her father worked at the local funeral home as a mortician and every single time I told someone they would shudder. You knew exactly what they were thinking because you’ve thought it too... “ Who would possibly CHOOSE to go into this profession??!!” Many felt the same way after watching the movie “ My girl” almost thirty years ago.

The stories that appealed the most to me were: the rocks, the two children playing hide and go seek , the man that died 8 hours ago, and the woman with the arms.

I’m not certain that readers will gain an understanding as to WHY a person chooses this future , but what I have learned without a doubt is that they are miracle workers and morticians have my utmost respect. They make it possible for us to have a more comfortable goodbye that we may have never had closure for. They handle what we cannot in a time of loss, and we should all be thoroughly grateful.

A great and informative read!!

[Hope · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Embalmer by Anne-Renee Caille is an uneasy survey of death, our relationship with it, and the people who work with death on a regular basis. The novel is written in poetic prose and each new section is punctuated by the examination of a different dead body the embalmer has worked on throughout his career. Each body has its own significance to the embalmer and through each body a different story is woven about our relationship with death, the living, and our hopeless attempts at understanding the two.

Whether it be morbid fascination or fear, every human has a strange relationship with death. Some people a drawn towards it, whilst other shy away.

“I am listening to what can be heard: a child who keeps company with the death and an adult who keeps company with the dead, who chooses them.”
p14

To choose the dead can mean many things. In some ways, I would argue that by choosing the dead the embalmer wishes to connect with death and connect with whatever is left after death has taken life. Yet the profession of an embalmer is to also create the illusion of life. With different embalming fluids and stitches, thick makeup and dyes, the embalmer reanimates the dead for the viewing pleasure of the living. Death, in this regard is very much about the living and those left behind. We can only perceive and understand death through the interpretation of life. No one has ever died and then come back later to tell all. The dead in this case are very simple,

“when it comes down to it, the dead expect nothing from us.”
p20

Even though the embalmer makes a living from giving life to corpses he notes that:

“A viewing offer nothing, only takes away everything, takes away even more if that is possible, because from that point on what is left is nothing, a casing hollowed of its flesh.”
p28

Despite the futility of his work, the embalmer is still somehow drawn to the dead. We never truly learn his motivations, just that when he was a child he was intrigued by death and dead bodies. Working with death attracts all sorts of people to it, some for honorable reasons like trying to understand death or to help the living move on after someone has passed on, however, there are also those who have a more devilish fascination with death.

The book talks of death by fire, suicide, murder, accident, fate, old age, water, and everything in between. It is not a book for those uncomfortable with death. The matter-of-fact way of speaking about death is comforting though and I found myself consoled by the uncomplicated prose.

The Embalmer is definitely a confronting read, but well worth consideration. What are your favourite books on death, the dead, and dying? As always share the reading love.

NOTE: this book was accessed through NetGalley and Couch House Books for review.

[Duckoffimreading · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a haunting view inside what an embalmer sees, documenting stories about the last moments, or post moments of life. It is a retelling of stories from a daughter interviewing her father and his experiences in the profession. Very short, but beautifully written with the stories told succinctly by design, to acknowledge but not dwell in some of the saddest or most disturbing happenings in human life. I always had a morbid interest into understanding why people are drawn to the mortician or embalming profession and if it makes the person able to accept the darkest parts of human life better. I think, in reading this book, that embalmers or morticians struggle emotionally with processing what they see, even to the point of refusing to work on certain cases. Most tragic were the stories of the children. Mishaps, drownings, getting stuck in old refrigerators…and the mothers who can’t fully process the state of their children’s bodies in death. There was a whole story on cremation, and how much of the body is really put into the box. There is nothing left of babies after they are cremated. The embalmer gets to see the full range of psychology – the way people are in denial, asking for viewings when there isn’t much of the body left to view, or filling caskets with rocks when the bodies cannot be retrieved. How we all process closure, and not in the same way. Also….brain tumors are more common among anatomists, pathologists and embalmers…they think it is the formaldehyde. How’s that for life. Overall, a very interesting read.

[WutheringReader Reviews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short, strange, and to the point. First off, thanks to NetGalley and Coach House Books for approving an early read.
With disjointed stories, I've always found it difficult to get attached to characters and plots. This book alleviates that pain by having the consistent tone of emotional dissociation.
This book follows a young woman who is taking note on the strangeness and morbidity of her father's job as an embalmer. While she tries to get to the bottom of why her father loves corpses so much, we are treated with stories and events from his career. With this, we get many interesting, often gruesome deaths explained very matter-of-factly with small, but meaningful sprinkles of her family life and how the father's career affects it.
Not only were the stories intriguing and impossible to put down, I found this to be a great (but slight) character study on someone so accustomed to death at such a young age. The ending, though from a story-telling perspective, may be considered underwhelming, fits in perfectly with where the characters and their attitudes are heading.
This is one I'm looking forward to re-reading the next time I get a craving for the macabre.

[Don Wentworth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's a little number, novella length at 80+ pages, that definitely isn't for everyone.

Not quite the equivalent of a snuff film, it does, however, take a deep look at death in its unblinking eye. When an eye is still available, that is.

The frame story has the child of a professional embalmer taking notes during a series of diner breakfasts over a protracted period of time. These encounters seem to be something of a summing up for the embalmer as he approaches the end of a long career. A wide variety of deaths are recounted. Each vignette is a page or two, with some being gruesome, some heart rending and some a distinct mixture of both. There are hints along the way of some of the things that effected the embalmer more than others.

The vignettes fly by and the reader will encounter things that they, too, must face up to.

The lesson here is learned by the speaker/narrator, the wisdom hard earned, literally as well as metaphysically.

Ultimately, this all is a very specific series of reminders that we spend the better part of our days trying to forget.

If it's for you, you'll know it.

It was, for me.

[Jenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

(DISCLAIMER: I read the English translation by Rhonda Mullins, so I can't speak to the original book's content. Of course, it is the same book, but sometimes some phrases are particular to a language and are just untranslatable, you know?)

This book is graphic and gruesome in a very offhanded way, but it also took care of me while I was reading it. The author compiles stories about her father's time working as an embalmer, and with death comes some truly horrifying stories. As a people we naturally want things to be tied up neatly - we want there to be answers, and we look towards a happy ending. This book doesn't have any answers. It serves as a discussion of a topic not many speak about, and it does not pretend that the topic is palatable. The book doesn't shy away from the gory details, but neither does it romanticize or embellish the work that an embalmer does. It was a very well written, tender look at the work of an embalmer through the eyes of his daughter, and I was thoroughly moved by it.

[Jessica · Rating 4 out of 5]

At the start of this I felt somewhat like I was trying to interpret someone else's class notes. Abbreviated paragraphs with little distinction between the interviewer and the subject were frustrating for the first several pages but fairly quickly the voices become more clear.

While the format of the book (short paragraphs, only one or two per page, an entire story told in 4 or 5 sentences) forces the feeling of a mediation of sorts (or, occasionally, a rumination.) It's not death that's being considered so much as it is our obsession with how we may unexpectedly (and horribly) die. No one in this book died peacefully in their sleep, only a few seem to have died of medical conditions. The Embalmer, like most of us, remembers the unusual, the disturbing, the things that evoked strong emotions that made him sad, disgusted, and fearful.

This is a strange little book that engenders an appreciation of the work of making the dead "presentable" and one that proves my family's favorite saying...."ya gotta die of something."

[Angélique (MapleBooks) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rating: 3.5

"Les cendres d'un bébé incinéré sont inexistantes. Il ne reste rien."

L'embaumeur est un projet fascinant: celui de transcrire l'expérience du père de l'auteur, thanatologue, communément appelé embaumeur. Il y aurait eu beaucoup de choses à développer, comme son étrange attirance pour les morts, dès l'enfance, ou l'impact du métier et des horreurs dont il fut témoin sur sa vision du monde.

Malheureusement l'ouvrage reste plutôt froid et laconique, malgré une écriture à tendance poétique, qui parfois rend la lecture plus difficile qu'autre chose. Le livre prend la forme d'une liste de souvenirs très courts, la plupart étant des "cas" sur lesquels l'embaumeur a travaillé. Ça prend rapidement la forme d'une série de faits divers franchement horribles, avec des détails perturbants et parfois insupportables sur l'état des dépouilles, que ce soit des suicidés adultes ou des enfants noyés, de grands brûlés ou des corps entièrement défigurés.

[Brenda · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this strange little book (essentially a list, almost a poem, of bodies embalmed by her father) in about 30 minutes while eating lunch - with only a few sentences, and sometimes only a few words, per page, it’s a quick read. I didn’t enjoy it, but not because of the gruesome descriptions of dead bodies (though I don’t know if I recommend reading it while eating lunch. Some images are rough.); I don’t know if it is a lost in translation issue, but I really didn’t enjoy the narration. It was like it was trying too hard to be beautiful and haunting and fell flat. I didn’t find it compelling or moving or captivating. In fact, the only reason I finished it was because I received it for free from Coach House/NetGalley in exchange for an honest review and didn’t feel like it was fair to call my review honest if I didn’t read the whole thing. If you are interested in a super interesting book about dead bodies, I recommend Stiff by Mary Roach.

[Sara Houle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ce livre m'a marquée il y a quelques années, mais sur le coup, j'ai été très désorientée en le lisant. Je m'attendais à un genre de plaidoyer pour diminuer l'effet du tabou lié à la mort, mais finalement, c'était pas mal plus concret et descriptif que je pensais! J'ai dû prendre une pause de lecture, parce que ça me traumatisait trop de passer d'une histoire horrible à l'autre aussi rapidement. Il y a encore une partie de moi qui se demande si ça rimait à quelque chose de lire les descriptions de corps morts et de circonstances de mort horribles... Mais en fin de compte, j'ai surtout apprécié le personnage du père, qui est l'embaumeur du titre. Si Caillé écrit un autre livre, je serais très intriguée de la lire de nouveau!

[Wrenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ephemeral narrative is told by the embalmer's daughter. She begins by describing how her father ends up in the business of preparing bodies for the families and how his work is more for the living than the dead.
Short vignettes of the dead. How they came to be there, details of their deaths.
A fascinating, unsparing and sometimes brutal account of all the facets of embalming. And how, in the end, we are all the same.
The author paints vivid images with her words and there is a sad, haunting quality to her expressions.
Thank you Netgalley and Coach House Books for a free copy of this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.

[Wrenn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This ephemeral narrative is told by the embalmer's daughter. She begins by describing how her father ends up in the business of preparing bodies for the families and how his work is more for the living than the dead.
Short vignettes of the dead. How they came to be there, details of their deaths.
A fascinating, unsparing and sometimes brutal account of all the facets of embalming.
And how, in the end, we are all the same.
The author paints vivid images with her words and there is a sad, haunting quality to her expressions.
Thank you Netgalley and Coach House Book for a free copy of this e-arc in exchange for an honest review.