The new book from Ask a Mortician creator Caitlin Doughty tackles our biggest, and strangest, questions about death.

Mortician Caitlin Doughty of the Youtube series Ask a Mortician, and the author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and From Here to Eternity, has unveiled her next delightfully morbid book. Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs: Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death will tackle some of those pressing questions we all have about about the inevitable.

From the book description:

Best-selling author and licensed mortician Caitlin Doughty answers real questions from kids about death, dead bodies, and decomposition.

Every day, funeral director Caitlin Doughty receives dozens of questions about death. What would happen to an astronaut’s body if it were pushed out of a space shuttle? Do people poop when they die? Can Grandma have a Viking funeral?

In the tradition of Randall Munroe’s What If?, Doughty’s new book, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs?, blends her scientific understanding of the body and the intriguing history behind common misconceptions about corpses to offer factual, hilarious, and candid answers to thirty-five urgent questions posed by her youngest fans. Readers will learn what happens if you die on an airplane, the best soil for mummifying your dog, and whether or not you can preserve your friend’s skull as a keepsake.

Featuring illustrations from Dianné Ruz, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? will delight anyone interested in the fascinating truth about what will happen (to our bodies) after we die.

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs hits the shelves on September 10.
Pre-order your copy right here.

For more morbid must-reads see the Cult of Weird recommended reading and the archive of fall reading lists.

Upcoming book from mortician Caitlin Doughty explores how other cultures care for their dead.

From Here to Eternity by Caitlin Doughty – Pre-order now

Death positive mortician Caitlin Doughty, best known for her Ask a Mortician series on Youtube and her best-selling book Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, just revealed her latest offering. In stores October 3rd, her new book From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death explores the intimate death rituals of cultures around the world that often seem so macabre and grotesque to Western society.

“This is three years in the making,” Caitlin wrote in the announcement on her Facebook page. “I’ve traveled all over the world to research this book, and I can’t tell you how proud I am of it. I hope you learn so much about death around the world, other cultures, and how we can improve funerals in the West.”

Here’s the description:

Fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies, mortician Caitlin Doughty set out to discover how other cultures care for their dead. In rural Indonesia, she observes a man clean and dress his grandfather’s mummified body. Grandpa’s mummy has lived in the family home for two years, where the family has maintained a warm and respectful relationship. She meets Bolivian natitas (cigarette- smoking, wish- granting human skulls), and introduces us to a Japanese kotsuage, in which relatives use chopsticks to pluck their loved- ones’ bones from cremation ashes. With curiosity and morbid humor, Doughty encounters vividly decomposed bodies and participates in compelling, powerful death practices almost entirely unknown in America. Featuring Gorey-esque illustrations by artist Landis Blair, From Here to Eternity introduces death-care innovators researching green burial and body composting, explores new spaces for mourning? including a glowing- Buddha columbarium in Japan and America’s only open-air pyre? and reveals unexpected new possibilities for our own death rituals.

Pre-order From Here to Eternity now