NAVIGATING NOWHERE

Emma Gee, Mapping the Afterlife: From Homer to Dante, Oxford University Press, 2020

This isn’t a book about the reality or otherwise of the afterlife, or beliefs about life after death in general. It’s a study of how the afterlife is presented in a selection of classical (and one medieval) works, chosen to ‘represent particular stations in the period from Homer to Dante’. Which is fine as far as it goes – but how far is that?

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STILL SEARCHING

Michael Shermer. Heavens on Earth, the Scientific Search for the Afterlife, Immortality and Utopia. Robinson, 2018.

This book is in many ways fascinating, at one point ghoulish, and finishes with a chapter, which fails to persuade me in favour of the author’s views. 

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POST-MORTEM EXAMINATIONS

Michael Sudduth. A Philosophical Critique of Empirical Arguments for Post-Mortem Survival. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

This book offers a detailed critique of the arguments used to defend the notion of survival of bodily death. In the first section of the book Sudduth lays out the classical arguments for the belief in life after death and what that belief make actually entail. 

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JOURNALISTS ON THE PARANORMAL

Annie Jacobsen. Phenomena: The Secret History of the US Government’s Investigation Into Extrasensory Perception And Psychokinesis. Little Brown, 2017.

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Leslie Kean. Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife. Crown Archetype, 2017.

These two books by award winning journalists take very different approaches to the subjects they discuss. Annie Jacobsen is a cool, detached outsider, not willing to align herself with any of the factions involved. Her book has a long list of notes, and bibliography, the latter including the list of people she interviewed.
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WHAT LIES BEYOND

Michael Martin and Keith Augustine (editors).  The Myth of an Afterlife: The Case Against Life After Death.  Rowman and Littlefield, 2015.

As the editors point out, there are plenty of books arguing the case for an afterlife but few that examine the case against.  This collection of thirty articles in over 650 pages does just that.
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THE CULTURAL ZOMBIE

Roger Luckhurst.   Zombies: A Cultural History.  Reaktion Books, 2015.

Zombies are all the rage today, the subjects of numerous films, comic books, video games and TV series, so much so that there is even a series of academic monographs entitled 'Zombie Studies. It is surely only a matter of time before some university or other creates a Department of Zombie Studies. 
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INTO THE GRAVEYARD TOGETHER

Chris Woodyard (Editor), The Ghost Wore Black: Ghastly Tales from the Past. Kestrel Publications.

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Chris Woodyard (Editor), The Victorian Book of the Dead. Kestrel Publications.

‘Soon it will be dusk. I have the dark lantern, the shovel, the hook, the sack. Let us go into the graveyard together.’ So declares Chris Woodyard, the selector and editor of the ghostly – nay, ‘ghastly’ – tales presented in The Ghost Wore Black. Should one have the nerve to accompany him, then clearly he’s the perfect companion and leader.
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THE DEAD ARE THE BEST THERAPISTS

Allan Botkin, and R. Craig Hogan. Induced After Death Communication: A Miraculous Therapy for Grief and Loss. Hampton Roads, 2014.

This is a book that will make a lot of people very uncomfortable. After all, anything with ‘After Death Communication’ in its title will automatically earn the derision of atheists and other sceptics, and might also seriously bother even those who waver somewhere on the fence between a belief in an afterlife and an assumption that death is truly the end.
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BACK FROM THE DEAD

Sam Parnia, with Josh Young. The Lazarus Effect. The Science That Is Erasing the Boundary Between Life and Death. Rider, 2013

This is a book in two parts; the first part is the scientific part, the one that explores the dramatic new breakthroughs in bringing back people from what is traditionally assumed to be death, after much longer periods than used to be thought possible. It was these techniques that lay behind the astonishing survival of the footballer Fabrice Muamba last year, a survival essentially due to the coincidental presence of a leading cardiac consultant in the crowd.
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DEAD AND ALIVE

Erlendur Haraldsson. The Departed Among the Living: An Investigative Study of Afterlife Encounters. White Crow Books, 2012.

A place where the dead are seen as very much among the living is Iceland, judging by Haraldsson’s study, based on surveys and follow up interviews in 1974 and 1980. Selected from this material were 449 accounts, presented in brief memorates, broken down into over thirty categories, covering themes such as the nature of the experience, the relationship between the percipient and the deceased, how the deceased died, circumstances surrounding the experience, etc.
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THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY

Carl Watkins. The Undiscovered Country: Journeys Among the Dead. Bodley Head, 2013.

Carl Watkins takes us on a truly haunting journey, through the realms of the dead as envisaged by the people of England over the last 650 years, from the fifteenth century to the end of the First World War. In the beginning was the traditional Christian world-view of Last Judgment, the Resurrection of the Dead, still envisaged in the middle of the nineteenth century in John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath.
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THE MORALITY OF IMMORTALITY

John Gray. The Immortalization Commission. Allen Lane, 2011.

Charles Darwin's Origin of Species published in 1859 presented a word in which human beings were totally embedded in the general and very mortal biological world, and not a special creation destined for immortality. John Gray explores ways in which human beings have tried to escape that fate and construct a path to immortality founded on science rather than religious revelation.
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LIFE AFTER DEATH

Anthony Peake. Is There Life After Death? The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When We Die. Arcturus Publishing, 2006.

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Anthony Peake. The Daemon: A Guide to Your Extraordinary Secret Self. Arcturus Publishing, 2008.

To cut to the chase, you know all those odd Fortean mysteries? Well Peake can explain them all. You see what happens when you die is that you live your life all over again, and again and again ad nauseum, in the last few moments of your life.
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