The Embalmer, by Canadian author Anne-Renee Caille, captures a woman reliving her father's days working as a mortician.  This is not a book that you will want to read if you have a sensitive stomach or are terrified by death or true crime. 

In The Embalmer, readers are given descriptions of skulls needing to be reconstructed by wax, weighted stones in a soldier's waterproof casket, and the young drowned boy who had his organs eaten by eels. The book is written in the style of a long poem, and is easy to read in about an hour. The book feels like someone desperately trying to understand both her father and the nature of death. The Embalmer is both fascinating and deeply uncomfortable.

Caille's The Embalmer is now available from Coach House Books.

A special thank you to NetGalley and Coach House Books for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

In the end, we all die, no one is exempt from death.

This fleeting narrative is a collection of vignettes about the dead. A father—the embalmer—relays the cases to his daughter. These are the notes of a life spent dealing with death and the aftermath, and a daughter trying to make sense of it all, including trying to make sense of her father. He speaks of children, of the elderly, of young women, of those marred in death, and of the secrets of his profession, like the powder that is injected into the cheeks for blush, how candle wax is used to reconstruct a skull, and weighing down an empty casket with the right amount of stones.

The retelling of these cases in note format works perfectly—it is as if the reader is the notetaker. His daughter is trying just as hard as the reader to make sense of her father's life which was spent staring at death. In a cruel irony, we learn that cases of brain tumours are more common among anatomists, pathologists and embalmers—they think it's the formaldehyde.

Fascinating, sad, gruesome, and isolating. This haunting book will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

This book should be considered poetry because the language is lyrical and beautiful. This is the story of a father and a daughter. The father is an the title character, The Embalmer, and the daughter doesn't understand why. Slowly, the father reveals why this is his chose path.

This reads more like a conversation about memories. It's a beautiful story, one that's rarely told. or talked about.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This is definitely not a book for everyone! When I first started reading it I wasn't sure it was for me either but after I settled in a bit I enjoyed it. I would not call this book a novel but a study of one family's relationship with death. Criticisms certainly have an important job to do and I applaud them for it. If you are squeamish you will not appreciate this endeavor but if you are not I.think you might enjoy it. Definitely worth four stars.

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.

Thanks to Coach House and Netgalley for the review copy.

This is a rather unusual yet compelling book. I guess I hesitate to call it a book at all. It's more a series of vignettes by a narrator interviewing her funeral director father about some of his past cases. The book itself is very short and each of the passages is perhaps one or two pages long.

Some of the examples written about are absolutely brutal and this is certainly not a book for the faint of heart or squeamish. If you have a morbid streak as I do, you are likely to appreciate it much more.

The book is written in a stilted, almost poetic style and it felt quite uncanny and chilling to read. Although there isn't a supernatural element to it, at certain points I felt a shiver down my spine and it got my heart thumping.

It's definitely not a book for everyone but I really enjoyed this. It felt unusual and thrilling and was definitely something different. If you're looking for something unique, consider giving it a read.

This sort text, about 80 eBook pages, centers around a daughter interviewing her father about his years as an embalmer. Each page offers a new case rich with details about death, the family, and doing his job. The passages aren’t long at all, the longest is near the end and is almost two pages long. Normally, each passage is about a page long.

When I started reading this book I was a little thrown off. I was expecting a story; I didn’t read anything about it beforehand. I really requested it because I liked the title. I don’t normally shy away from gory or odd books and topics. I genuinely enjoy reading those things that aren’t truly mainstream and that may come off as a little weird. Hence, my attraction to this one. Instead, this setup of the passages themselves are very poetic. The author’s word choice and diction in general has a very ethereal feel. I found myself floating through the passages as I read it. It is almost like you are only hovering over each short story, seeing the most pertinent details but never really delving deep. It adds dramatically to the overall haunting atmosphere of the entire piece. The diction along with the stark whiteness and emptiness of most of the pages adds a visual layer to the atmosphere. The author does such a good job creating this feeling with these layers of detail, that it just drips from each page.

Along with the creation of this permeable atmosphere across the book is the amount of details given to each case recounted by her father. This is also echoed near the end of the book when she discusses how her father’s interviews with her become quicker and shorter. The case details, while they may be scant, are so powerful. The author knows exactly what to say to invoke the strongest images and feelings. I am normally not bothered by descriptions of death or reading them; however, I was not okay reading most of what’s in this book. There isn’t gore, per se, but the details are so descriptive it can be hard to get pictures out of your head. There are so many different types of death depicted in this book, so if that is something you can’t handle I would pass them one up.

On Goodreads I gave this book five stars. I really enjoyed reading it. The feelings that it invoked were so strong, the writing was seriously perfect for the subject, the story itself was quite touching especially in the epilogue, and the overall feeling of the book itself was nicely done. This would be a really great read for Halloween. (Probably not Christmas, as when I am reading it!) If this is something that is up your alley and you don’t mind some squeamish details, then I would definitely suggest this book. It’s pretty short and easily read within an hour or two. Thank you NetGalley and Coach House Books for the digital review copy!

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 are 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.

This is not a novel. I would argue it is a book of prose, of poetry, of vignettes.
I liked it a lot, but was not expecting the structure of the book. I was expecting a fiction story, and this is not. It is a dreamlike exposition of memory and a relationship between a family and death. Life, and death, and how living amongst death changes a person.
It reads like each 'memory' is a poem, albeit an untradtional one. Once I got my head around it, I enjoyed it, but think I would have preferred a traditional novel.

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.

Thank you to Coach House and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this book. It is a short and sweet journey a mere 80 pages in length,, each page dedicated to a person and the memory of their death. Some ordinary some not so ordinary. In some instances you can really understand the dilemma faced by her father in some of the situations. Also it is quite obvious that most of the work done by the funeral home and the embalmer is not for the dead but for those still living, allowing all the parties still breathing to continue their lives knowing that their loved one is safe and secure in their ‘death’.
I enjoyed the style of the writing as well the almost poetic form rather than prosaic it helps with the material and the harrowing realities of some of the deaths. It was interesting as it was almost like we were getting the snippets of memory from her father in the same way that they were falling from his brain, moments that stayed with him over all the years that he did the work.
The reality of death is not something we see very often and in most instances it is romanticized or warped depending on the need of the story or narrative we are beholding. This was realistic yet subtle and I became aware of my reality a few times whilst reading this - we are all going to end up in this very place one day.
I was warmed by the extra knowledge we receive at the end about her father and mother and how it is explained with some subtle warnings about chemicals etc.
Overall, it was a lovely piece and I enjoyed it.

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!!