The Dead Hand Book is a memorial to mortality and the ancestral
liaison with death through quiet and sweetly-macabre short stories.
The Dead Hand Book is a memorial to mortality and the ancestral liaison
with death through quiet and sweetly-macabre short stories. The
collection of fables is inspired by the manner those long gone have had
their memories engraved onto slate and marble stones with the cadence of
an old Folk song or Murder Ballad. Tales of warning, the deepest loves
honored by surviving paramours and the indifferent cruelty of life in
the 17th-20th century are all recorded in the Stories From Gravesend
Cemetery. The purpose of this book is to educate the casual cemetery
wanderer about how to read the old stones they pass by and to excite the
#deathpositivity movement enthusiast or morbidly curious. This book
aims help honor those who have come before us by opening the door of
understanding the strange records inscribed in old cemeteries; many of
those interred below having only that record of their life existing on a
crumbling stone. The stories are short and often open-ended to allow the
reader to contemplate their interpretation of the endings, maybe even
their own mortality. (Much like the way Edward Gorey crafted his short
stories.) Modern attitudes towards death have become sodden with
superstition, misinformation and fear; this book's goal is to illuminate
how those of the near past embraced, cared for, and honored death as an
obvious part of life. Not long ago art was very much an integral part of
funerary celebrations such as elaborate Memento Mori carvings on ancient
gravestones and the hair jewelry of the Victorians. Those relics are
celebrated in The Dead Hand Book.
