My Review
Candid, raw, unfiltered...Loren's essays about life, death, dying, and living are utterly fascinating - completely engrossing.
I picked up the book to read one or two chapters and before I knew it I had completed 3/4 of the book. I just couldn't put it down.
What really hooked me at first was the familiarity. The first essay takes place in Flushing and Flint.
Yup, right where I live.
And yes Loren and I share a last name but as far as we can tell are not related at all. We have spoken online but never met in person. I do hope next time she comes to town for a book signing I'll get to meet her.
Loren grew up just a couple miles from me in Flushing back when it was more of a small-town farm community. Many of the places she mentions in her essays I know- Flushing, Flint, Sunset Hills Cemetery, Glenwood Cemetery... but I'm seeing them through a completely different lens because her teen and twenties experiences were in the late 70s and 80s while mine was in the 90s and 2000s.
But what really fascinates me is her stories after she left Michigan. She got out and lived a big life in San Francisco and traveled all over the world.
Weird, wild, morbid...it's all in the book. I love it. It is completely different than anything I've ever read before. I can't wait to read more.
No Rest for the Morbid
Book One
Loren Rhoads
Genre: Non-Fiction/Memoir/Horror
Publisher: Automatism Press
Date of Publication: August 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7351876-2-4 (paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-7351876-3-1 (ebook)
ASIN: B09C11J43W
Number of pages: 200
Word Count: 58 K
Cover Artist: Lynne Hansen
Tagline: What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life.
Book Description:
What others have called an obsession with death is really a desperate romance with life. Guided by curiosity, compassion, and a truly strange sense of humor, this particular morbid life is detailed through a death-positive collection of 45 confessional essays. Along the way, author Loren Rhoads takes prom pictures in a cemetery, spends a couple of days in a cadaver lab, eats bugs, survives the AIDS epidemic, chases ghosts, and publishes a little magazine called Morbid Curiosity.
Originally written for zines from Cyber-Psychos AOD to Zine World and online magazines from Gothic.Net to Scoutie Girl, these emotionally charged essays showcase the morbid curiosity and dark humor that transformed Rhoads into a leading voice of the curious and creepy.
Excerpt
from "Anatomy Lesson":
I had a lot of preconceptions when it came
to handling corpses. I’d imagined myself standing before a wall of stainless-steel
freezer drawers like at the Mortuary College in San Francisco. In my
imagination, the cadavers were draped with crisp white sheets. The bodies would
be antiseptic. I expected them to be frozen. I thought everything would be as
clean and neat as a television morgue.
The cadavers would be male, of course. I
thought I could depersonalize a dead man more easily; I might empathize too
much with a woman as the scalpel in my hand sliced her flesh.
Tom quickly rearranged my expectations.
“Three of the four cadavers here are female,” he said. “I usually start people
out with the women, since they’re the most taken apart. That’s a little easier
for people to deal with.”
The bodies weren’t kept in refrigeration
units. Instead, they were already waiting in the front of the classroom, lying
in long stainless-steel bins with wheeled legs and a hinged two-piece top. When
Tom folded the top open, clear fluid spilled onto the floor.
“Condensation?” I hoped.
“And some preservative,” he answered. When
the worst of the runoff had stopped, he let the top hang down and opened the
other side.
I was amazed we’d been in the room with the
bodies all along. One of my memories still clear from ninth grade dissection
was the horrible, headache-inducing smell of formaldehyde. I was glad preservative
technology had improved.
A length of muslin floated atop the
brownish red liquid. Blood, I thought immediately, and recoiled. Too thin for
blood, it looked more like beef broth. Pools of oil slicked the surface.
“See that handle there? You can help me by
turning it.” Tom moved to the far end of the tank.
There should have been scary music playing
as we cranked the cadavers out of the fluid. As the bodies slowly rose, the
muslin took on their outlines. Through the shroud, I saw bared teeth and the
flensed musculature of jaw. Two corpses lay head to feet. The skin had clearly been
flayed from their muscles.
If Tom had made them twitch, I would have
leapt out of my own skin.
He pulled on some heavy turquoise rubber
gloves and folded the muslin so it shrouded both faces and one entire body. The
other lay revealed. Her skin had been stripped away. She had no breasts. The
muscle fibers of her chest were very directional and clear, the raw color of a
New York strip steak. Some of the muscles on her arms had been removed to show
the bones and tendons beneath. Her fingertips still had nails and skin. The
skin was the color of dried blood.
Loren Rhoads is the author of 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die, Wish You Were Here: Adventures in Cemetery Travel, a space opera trilogy, and a duet about a succubus and her angel. She is also the editor of Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues: Tales of the Unsavory, Unwise, Unorthodox, and Unusual and Tales for the Camp Fire: An Anthology Benefiting Wildfire Relief. This Morbid Life, her 15th book, is the first in the No Rest for the Morbid Series. Book 2, Jet Lag and Other Blessings, will be out in 2022.
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3 comments:
Wow, Roxanne, thank you so much for your kind words! You made my day.
I just finished reading This Morbid Life a few minutes ago. I agree wholeheartedly with your review. It's an excellent read!
Thanks, Priscilla!
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