Morbid Must-Reads: Recommended Reading from the Cult of Weird Book Club
If you’re looking to dig into a new book to satisfy your morbid curiosity, you’ve come to the right place. This selection of morbid must-reads from Cult of Weird includes:
- Books about death, funerals, and mourning
- Weird history
- Cryptozoology
- Archaeology
- Science
- Travel
- Paranormal & haunted places
- Circus history and sideshow freaks
- True crime
- Medical history
- The occult
- Fiction
- Oddities, wunderkammer, and macabre collections
- Weird books for kids
Weird Books Best Sellers & Top Picks
Victorian Book of the Dead
The Victorian Book of the Dead by Chris Woodyard explores historical accounts of exploding corpses, petrified corpse furniture, a man who lived in his wife’s tomb, ghosts, banshees, and other bizarre true tales of Victorian mourning.
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Atlas of Cursed Places
Atlas of Cursed Places explores 40 locations around the world that are “rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death.”
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Beyond the Dark Veil
Beyond the Dark Veil is a collection of post-mortem and mourning photography from The Thanatos Archive, along with newspaper clippings and other ephemera documenting death and funerals in the Victorian Era.
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Morbid Curiosities
Morbid Curiosities by Paul Gambino takes a look at some of the most extraordinary and macabre collections from the likes of Ryan Matthew Cohn, Evan Michelson, and more.
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Smoke Gets in Your Eyes
Mortician Caitlin Doughty takes you inside the crematorium and pulls back the curtain to demystify death.
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Ghostland
Ghostland by Colin Dickey examines the history of America’s haunted places and how the spirits of the past affect the living who exist in those places now.
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The Butchering Art
Before Joseph List’s antiseptic method, surgery was a brutal affair that often put patients in more danger than the afflictions the pre-anesthetic operations were supposed to cure. The Butchering Art by Lindsey Fitzharris tells the tales of operating theaters, dead houses, grave robbery, and the breakthroughs that changed medicine forever.
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Lost City of the Monkey God
In 2015 an expedition into the deadly and unexplored jungles of Honduras revealed the ruins of a lost city once inhabited by an unknown civilization. Author Douglas Preston was there every step of the way, from the lidar flights to peer beneath the jungle canopy in search of signs of ancient human existence, to the discovery of a vast city abandoned long ago and a cache of ancient artifacts that may have been an offering to the monkey god before residents fled in fear of curses and disease.
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As Above, So Below
The Freemasons, Odd Fellows, and other fraternal societies formed bonds and developed values which they portrayed through enigmatic symbols of all-seeing eyes, skulls, crossbones, beehives, and more. As Above, So Below is packed with fraternal history and the photos of the secret works of art they used to keep closely guarded within the walls of private lodges and temples across America.
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Cabinet of Curiosities
Learn how to preserve and classify specimens from the natural world and build your very own curiosity cabinet.
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Rest in Pieces
In Rest in Pieces, author Bess Lovejoy tells true stories of grave robbing, missing brains, cadaver brandy, and other misadventures undertaken by the corpses of famous people.
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Diableries
These incredibly rare 3-D stereoscopic views of Hell originated in France in the 1860s. Diableries collects them all into once place so you can revel in their torment with an included stereoscopic viewer.
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Goatman: Flesh or Folklore?
Tales of half-goat, half-man creatures luring hapless teens to their doom and murdering wayward travelers exist across the US. Goatman: Flesh or Folklore? takes you from the backwoods of Wisconsin, where several goatman legends lurk just off the beaten path, to the Pope Lick Trestle in Kentucky where numerous people have lost their lives, and into the government laboratories of Maryland where local lore says a genetic freak was created who now roams the woods with an axe. J. Nathan Couch recounts sightings of famous creatures like the Beast of Billiwack, Pennsylvania’s Sheepman, Sheepsquatch in West Virginia, the Lake Worth Monster of Texas, and other hooved horrors in search of goatman’s origins.
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Stiff
Heavenly Bodies
Taxidermy Art
The Occult, Witchcraft, & Magic
Unmentionable
The Invention of Murder
A Season With the Witch
From Here to Eternity
Death: An Oral History
Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us
American Monsters
The Sick Rose
Death and the Afterlife
Mutter Museum
American Grotesque
The Empire of Death
Cabinets of Wonder
Funerals to Die For
Freak Babylon
Mortuary Confidential
The Strange Case of William Mumler
The Embalmed Head of Oliver Cromwell
Still Life
Occult America
Know a good book that should be included here? Tell me about it.
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