The Mortician's Friends
For thirty years, Daniel Foster has cared for the dead. He never expected them to stay.
A funeral director in a crumbling Southern funeral home, Daniel knows how to close a stranger's eyes, hide the evidence of suffering, and return a body to its family looking peaceful. The dead are patient. They make no demands. Since losing his wife and young daughter, he has found them far easier company than the living.
Then an elderly woman rises beside his table, while her body still lies beneath his hands.
One by one, others begin to linger. A frightened young man waits on the stairs. An angry father carries the weight of everything he left unfinished. A woman scrubs endlessly at guilt that will not wash away. They never speak. Yet each of them gives Daniel back something grief had taken for good: the feeling of not being alone.
But as the headaches deepen, the hours go missing, and his own senses begin to betray him, Daniel is forced toward the one question he has spent a lifetime avoiding. Have the dead truly chosen him as their companion, or is a breaking mind building friends where no one stands at all?
The Mortician's Friends is a quiet, devastating supernatural novel about grief, guilt, memory, and the small mercies we cling to when nothing else can be repaired. Intimate as a whispered confession and steadily suffocating in its dread, it lingers long after the final page for readers who love the slow, human horror of Shirley Jackson and a ghost story that was never really about the ghosts.
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