RESTORATIVE ARTIST

An embalmer haunted by the death of his lover pulls apart his relationship and his funeral home to escape the pain of grief. Queer book club meets gothic horror in this debut novel from a former funeral professional.

Graham has built his life around the dead. He's a talented embalmer, the devoted director of his own funeral home, and the guiding hand behind a small but respected team. After a corpse-carried illness forces him to reckon with his own mortality, Graham struggles to confront the lingering pain of a recent loss. Grief, he finds, is not so easily diagnosed, dissected, and named. It is not so easily cured.

Betrayed by his body and unable to accept the pain death has caused him, Graham loses faith in his profession and the person he's become in its service. The past – which he imagines as a story of love and self-acceptance – becomes Graham's refuge. But in the present, influenced by increasingly gruesome visions of the deceased, Graham withdraws from his funeral home with devastating consequences for himself, his new girlfriend, and his colleagues. As his life, and even his sanity, starts to fragment, Graham struggles to rediscover the importance of his work and the history that haunts him before he loses everything and everyone close to him.

The Restorative Artist is a dissection of memory and embodiment, set against the morbid decadence—and sterilising secrecy—of the US funeral industry. Through Graham's confrontations with the spectre of his deceased lover, the horror of his work, and his uneasy relationship with his own transgender body, it dares to ask how anyone can continue in the face of loss.