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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Atlas of Cursed Places

Atlas of Cursed Places explores 40 locations around the world that are “rife with disaster, chaos, paranormal activity, and death.”
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

Mortician Caitlin Doughty takes you inside the crematorium and pulls back the curtain to demystify death.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
PRE-ORDER NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Cabinet of Curiosities

Learn how to preserve and classify specimens from the natural world and build your very own curiosity cabinet.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

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.
BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Stiff

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Heavenly Bodies

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Taxidermy Art

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

The Occult, Witchcraft, & Magic

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Unmentionable

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

The Invention of Murder

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

A Season With the Witch

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

From Here to Eternity

PRE-ORDER NOW ON AMAZON

Death: An Oral History

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Memento Mori: The Dead Among Us

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

American Monsters

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

The Sick Rose

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Death and the Afterlife

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Mutter Museum

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

American Grotesque

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

The Empire of Death

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Cabinets of Wonder

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Funerals to Die For

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Freak Babylon

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Mortuary Confidential

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

The Strange Case of William Mumler

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

The Embalmed Head of Oliver Cromwell

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Still Life

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Occult America

BUY NOW ON AMAZON

Know a good book that should be included here? Tell me about it.