In 2020, the poet Jean Sprackland published These Silent Mansions, a rather wonderful book about graveyards; this was followed a few months later by Peter Ross’s A Tomb with a View, inspired by the author’s graveyard walks. The latter became a ‘sleeper’ hit, as if to prove that death and graves still exert a strong fascination, despite – or perhaps because of – the death-denying tendencies of our times. And now along come two more books on the graveyard theme – books that could hardly be more different from each other, or from those two 2020 volumes. 

Roger Luckhurst’s Graveyards is a lovely production job (as you might expect of publishers Thames & Hudson), beautifully designed, with striking typography and a wealth of well-chosen illustrations. Luckhurst, an academic who has written cultural histories of the Gothic and of zombies, divides his wide-ranging history of our dealings with the dead into three parts; as he says, ‘this book has grand ambitions.’ The first part takes the story from the earliest evidence of burial practices to the necropolises of imperial Rome. The second explores the fascination that the ceremonial of death has held for anthropologists and ‘dark tourists’ alike, before surveying the many different ways in which the world’s major religions deal with the dead. Part three focuses on ‘a problem of modernity’ – what to do with ‘the numberless dead’ that accrue as a result of explosive population growth. An afterword ponders what might come next, looking at cryogenic preservation, the problem of the ‘digital undead’ living on in cyberspace and the creepy possibilities of AI (apparently artist Laurie Anderson has been chatting to an AI avatar of her late partner Lou Reed for several years). Reassuringly, Luckhurst concludes that funeral rites and graveyards are ‘still vital rituals and places of transition’.

The book ranges over the pyramids and mummies of ancient Egypt, the catacombs of Rome and 19th-century Paris, Tibetan ‘sky burials’ and Huron-Wendat ossuaries, country churchyards, national cemeteries and much more besides. Luckhurst writes that ‘no graveyard history can ever be linear or exhaustive’, but his book covers plenty of