This illustrated compendium by the author of Horror in the Heartland reveals macabre tales of death, hauntings and unexplained events in Kentucky’s past. Author Keven McQueen specializes in uncovering local legends, strange-but-true incidents, and outright hoaxes that newspapers of the past found fit to print. In his Kentucky Book of the Dead, McQueen resurrects creepy stories of life and death in the Bluegrass State, each presented with commentary as well as line drawing by illustrator Kyle McQueen. In these pages, readers will discover the Grim Reaper's creative side, meet the disgusting ghosts of Louisville, and find out more than they to know about old-fashioned embalming techniques. Kentucky Book of the Dead is by turns spine-tingling and entertaining, engrossing and just plain gross

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.

The life of a homicide cop is death with many causes: death for love, death for hate, death for revenge, death for money or death for no reason at all. The homicide cops worst nightmare is death by a serial killer with a plan. This gritty and fast moving story of a search for such a killer is a realistic portrayal of homicide investigation written by a former homicide detective who has been there. I was a homicide investigator during the time frame of this novel and I am impressed with the detail and account of both the technical and routine phases of murder investigations as we did them back in the day. Gerald R. Beavers Former Chief of Police, Asheville, North Carolina and Topeka, Kansas A fresh homicide on the street. Grab your pen and notebook and get to the scene. Beat the bushes. Talk to the street cops who show up. Talk to the street people whose trust you have developed over the years bartenders, prostitutes, crooks, store owners. The drums are beating in the neighborhood. People are talking. Get the right information and you solve the case. No DNA; no C. S. I.; no cell phones; no online information sources. No psychological profi les other than the knowledge and memory of sharp cops. No scientifi c interrogation techniques other than experience and knowledge of human nature. We found the killers and we put them away. This is the way it was in the late 1960s and Ed Mercer captures the tableau perfectly. The Dead Stroll is a nostalgia trip for those of us who walked the walk and talked the talk in those days and a historical document for those cops currently working homicides an authentic depiction of how it was. The scenes of riot and turmoil in the streets, the pressures of external and internal politics, the cops wit and crisp dialogue are all vivid and real. Dont miss this great read which is told in a way that only be written by a guy who has been there. Harry T. OReilly Detective Sergeant (retired) NYPD, Former supervisor, Manhattan South Homicide and Special Victims Unit

When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she's gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet -- whose last book, Seed across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation -- lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet's fascination with the "neighbors" brings the burial ground back to life. Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These "neighbors," with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones. Next Door to the Dead transcends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell's poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us.

Food has played a major role in funerary and memorial practices since the dawn of the human race. In the ancient Roman world, for example, it was common practice to build channels from the tops of graves into the crypts themselves, and mourners would regularly pour offerings of food and drink into these conduits to nourish the dead while they waited for the afterlife. Funeral cookies wrapped with printed prayers and poems meant to comfort mourners became popular in Victorian England; while in China, Japan, and Korea, it is customary to offer food not only to the bereaved, but to the deceased, with ritual dishes prepared and served to the dead. Dying to Eat is the first interdisciplinary book to examine the role of food in death, bereavement, and the afterlife. The contributors explore the phenomenon across cultures and religions, investigating topics including tombstone rituals in Buddhism, Catholicism, and Shamanism; the role of death in the Moroccan approach to food; and the role of funeral casseroles and church cookbooks in the Southern United States. This innovative collection not only offers food for thought regarding the theories and methods behind these practices but also provides recipes that allow the reader to connect to the argument through material experience. Illuminating how cooking and corpses both transform and construct social rituals, Dying to Eat serves as a fascinating exploration of the foodways of death and bereavement.

For millennia, the rituals of death and remembrance have been fixed by time and location, but in the twenty-first century, grieving has become a virtual phenomenon. Today, the dead live on through social media profiles, memorial websites, and saved voicemails that can be accessed at any time. This dramatic cultural shift has made the physical presence of death secondary to the psychological experience of mourning. Virtual Afterlives investigates emerging popular bereavement traditions. Author Candi K. Cann examines new forms of grieving and evaluates how religion and the funeral industry have both contributed to mourning rituals despite their limited ability to remedy grief. As grieving traditions and locations shift, people are discovering new ways to memorialize their loved ones. Bodiless and spontaneous memorials like those at the sites of the shootings in Aurora and Newtown and the Boston Marathon bombing, as well as roadside memorials, car decals, and tattoos are contributing to a new bereavement language that crosses national boundaries and culture-specific perceptions of death. Examining mourning practices in the United States in comparison to the broader background of practices in Asia and Latin America, Virtual Afterlives seeks to resituate death as a part of life and mourning as a unifying process that helps to create identities and narratives for communities. As technology changes the ways in which we experience death, this engaging study explores the culture of bereavement and the ways in which it, too, is being significantly transformed.

The First World War is a watershed in the intellectual and spiritual history of the modern world. On the one hand, it brought an end to a sense of optimism and decency bred by the prosperity of nineteenth-century Europe. On the other, it brought forth a sense of futility and alienation that has since pervaded European thought. That cataclysmic experience is richly reflected in the work of writers and artists from both sides of the conflict, and this study provides a detailed analysis of two basic themes—death and degradation—that mark the literature about the war. From their accounts most men entered the war lightheartedly, filled with ideals of patriotism and glory, but these generous feelings were soon quelled as the war settled into a stalemate, its operations reduced to simply grinding away the opposing forces. In these operations, Alfredo Bonadeo shows, men became mere aggregations thrown against one another, wasted with no appreciable effects or gains, save carnage itself. This cheapening and disregard for human life and being Bonadeo finds rooted not only in the conditions of war but, significantly, in a contempt for the common man prevailing in European political and intellectual circles. This attitude is revealed most plainly in his analysis of the Italian literature, which hitherto has received little note. Italian leaders saw the war as an opportunity to expiate a sense of national guilt, and here the inconclusive campaigns made their futility all the greater. Out of the torn fields of the First World War grew the seeds of a second, greater conflict, but, Professor Bonadeo concludes, the flowering of the seeds was aided by the degradation of man's spirit on those fields. The grim focus of this book, the dead voices it evokes, leads to a new appreciation of the meaning of the Great War.