RERUN: I Read Dead People: Ghosts, Morticians, and the Dead in Romance

Fated Mates - Romance Books for Novel People

The hosts of Fated Mates explore a growing trend in contemporary and paranormal romance novels that center on death care, funeral homes, and ghosts helping the living process grief. They connect this literary

Key takeaways

• Sarah McClain noticed a post-2022 surge in romance novels featuring funeral directors, morticians, and embalming scenes as workplace settings.
• Jen Prokop identifies a recurring paranormal plot where humans must help trapped ghosts move on to the afterlife, often mirroring their own unresolved grief.

Main topics

• Pandemic-era grief in romance novels
• Funeral home and mortuary workplace romances

Notable quotes

"Death doesn't keep polite hours."

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how romance fiction is evolving to help readers process collective trauma

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) This week's episode of Fated Mates will include a conversation on death, dying, grief, and the pandemic. So take Speaker 4 (0:08) that as it comes. Speaker 4 (0:11) Hard to banter after that, I suppose, but, you know. Speaker 5 (0:16) It's fine. You know, here's the thing that I was talking to Eric about today is, like, these books are genuinely funny, a lot of them. And, I mean, I think that we'll get into why that is, but I, like, I had a number of experiences where I was like, oh, no, this is a genuinely funny situation that these people are in. But before we get into that. Speaker 5 (0:36) Let's just quickly get Faded States out of the way. Okay. Because I want to do some housekeeping. Typically, we talk about Faded States at the end of the episode, but I want to talk about the beginning of the episode this year. This year. This week. This week, which feels like a year, Jen. Well, because next week Speaker 4 (0:55) is a big week. Speaker 5 (0:58) There's an election coming in the United States, everyone. I don't know if you've heard. Speaker 4 (1:03) If you haven't, Speaker 5 (1:05) bless. I Speaker 4 (1:06) hope you're having the Speaker 5 (1:07) greatest life. It sounds amazing. We have one more week of phone banking, and we're calling Michigan this week on Saturday from 1 to 3 p.m. Eastern Time. Join us. And join us for lots of reasons. Join us because we no longer hold the indivisible phone banking record. And I'm very upset about that. And I would like to. So we need more people in the phone bank. Join us to save democracy. Note that I put that second. Like, Speaker 4 (1:37) persons first. It's fine. We are who we are. In times of crisis, we really show our true selves. Speaker 5 (1:46) Join us to bring Michigan home for Harris-Walls and Democrats up and down the ticket. Sadly, Eminem will not be joining us, though he is doing a lot of work around Michigan. Speaker 4 (2:00) What a guy. Maybe we should ask him. Speaker 5 (2:04) He Speaker 4 (2:05) definitely. Jen, you only get one shot. So I've heard. You know, join us for the feeling of community that you will have in the phone bank, right? And that is, I think, the biggest part. And along with it, that feeling of a community working together towards a common goal. Speaker 5 (2:23) And the fleeting moment of like, okay, I did a thing. I did something. Like I moved a needle. Yeah. A tiny little movement in the needle. You pulled on a thread. Yeah. along with lots of other people. So to do that, go to fadedmates.net slash faded states and sign up for the Michigan phone bank, which is the only one left. We're going to leave it all on the field, all gas, no breaks, right through the 5th of November. Remember, remember the Speaker 4 (2:50) 5th of November. Do you know this? I remember, remember. It's not the 5th of November, right? Is that what you say? It Speaker 5 (2:58) is the Speaker 4 (2:58) 5th of November. Remember, remember the 5th of November, the gunpowder treason and plot. Oh, is Speaker 5 (3:04) this about. You know it from V for Vendetta. I was like, Speaker 4 (3:08) I think I know this from a movie. You do. You know this from Speaker 5 (3:11) V for Vendetta, which features that like strangely attractive guy who is in the Matrix. Mr. Smith. That guy. Hugo Weaving. Hugo Weaving. And Speaker 4 (3:22) Natalie Portman. I agree. So, yes, that is correct. Speaker 5 (3:27) That's a great movie, V for Vendetta. Everybody should go watch that. It's very fun. But in actual fact, that comes from Guy Fawkes Day. It doesn't say. It's Guy Fawkes Day, right? Yeah. Yeah. You know about Guy Fawkes. You read romance novels. I read romance novels. Come Speaker 4 (3:42) on, Sarah. Speaker 4 (3:45) But I really today was like, oh, Speaker 5 (3:47) my God. Yeah. We and I posted to threads today. I was like, remember, remember, the 5th of November is really. It's coming back. Like a different kind of vibe this year. Sure. Sure. The gunpowder treason and plot. So anyway, here's what we're going to do, everybody. We're all going to Speaker 4 (4:07) take a deep breath. Try to mitigate some anxiety. We're going to Speaker 5 (4:12) phone bank together. We're going to talk to our friends who haven't early voted and we're going to bring this home. Speaker 4 (4:19) I feel. Speaker 5 (4:23) Yeah, nauseatingly optimistic. Speaker 4 (4:24) That's what I, I found a tweet that I posted to my Instagram feed the Speaker 5 (4:28) other day that said that, and it felt Speaker 4 (4:30) right. You know what? I feel like the electorate is the one that keeps bringing us home and saying we don't want this. We don't want this. We don't want this. And so that's all I can do. I think it's also getting to the point where we're seeing, you know, huge lines of people early voting in places. And, you know, and so I'm typically not an early voter. I really like to vote the day of, but my anxiety is so high that I might early vote. Speaker 5 (4:54) Early vote and then just go lay down on the sticky floor of a Chicago tavern and just wait. Sure. Speaker 4 (5:01) I am with my people. I mean, you know what? I will say I think a lot about how lucky I am to work in my office with people who feel like me. And so there's a lot of... Like solidarity is just really important. So that's why we phone bank and that's why we find each other. So we have a big guest coming Speaker 5 (5:24) this weekend. Yeah, we do. Speaker 4 (5:26) I thought Suze Brockman saying that if you really phone banking to voters feels too stressful, you could sign up to do ballot curing phone banking. A lot of people find that to be far less stressful because you're only calling voters whose mail-in ballots have a mistake and you're essentially calling them to. get them to fix it. So it's like you're talking to a voter with, you know what I mean? So you already know they Speaker 5 (5:52) have voted. It's already done. Speaker 4 (5:54) Yeah. And you know that you're literally like every person I talk to, I am literally moving the needle because this ballot that was on was incorrect, right? Or had something missing now can be processed. So correct. We can put some links in there. I thought that was like really good advice. The fairy godmother of phone banks. It's amazing. She should run Fated States. Speaker 5 (6:18) Welcome, everyone, to Fated Mates. I'm Sarah McClain. I Speaker 4 (6:22) read Speaker 5 (6:22) romance novels and I write them. And I'm Jennifer Speaker 4 (6:25) Prokop, a romance reader and editor. Speaker 5 (6:27) And as part of the writing part of my job, I had a meeting this week at Ballantyne Books, which is the publisher for my contemporary novel, which is coming out in the summer. And I had lunch with my editor, Shauna Summers, after the meeting. And she told me that she edited all those Troubleshooters books. Amazing. And Speaker 4 (6:49) I was like, a dream editor. And she's the one who edited those Molly O'Keefe books. Everything I left unsaid. Speaker 5 (6:57) So listen. And she listens to the podcast, so. Hi, Shauna. And Speaker 4 (7:02) also, thanks for all those great books. Yeah, I'm like, hi, Shauna. AI is going to make me quit my job teaching. Do you want to hire me? I live in Chicago. I'm a nice person. She loves a romance novel. I know my way around a romance novel. Speaker 5 (7:17) So anyway. I'm sorry. We won't talk about AI, though. I can't talk about the election and AI. No, too much. Only one end of days situation at a time. But I do just want to give a shout out to... Two people I want to shout out. Tim Walls, who called Elon Musk a dipshit at a rally this week. Amazing. Which, like, somebody on threads was like, this is the, like, peak Midwestern dad insult. Like, dipshit. Speaker 4 (7:46) I mean, I completely, like, can channel that, yeah. Speaker 5 (7:50) And then I want to shout out Eminem, who has done, he did speak at a rally. But this morning, Elon Musk. Came for him on Twitter, and now I await the diss track. Oh, yeah. Like, I cannot wait for how he is going to just destroy that dipshit. Speaker 5 (8:10) I also appreciated someone... on threads the other day was like. Did Eminem get hot? Speaker 4 (8:19) It's very unsettling. Speaker 4 (8:24) Things are still weird. I know. I thought the same thing. And I was like, I have to turn this off. I'm so confused by my feelings right now. Anyway, it's a strange time, 2024. Anyway, Speaker 5 (8:35) it is. It is. It really is. Here we go. So what are we doing? Should I talk about what we're doing today? Or do Speaker 4 (8:42) you want to talk about it? You talk about it. You have something to say. We have been for the past year and a half. talking about the question of how the pandemic is presenting in romance and how we on the podcast could talk about grief, the pandemic, right, all those things. And so this has been like sort of an ongoing question, I would say. Wouldn't you say that's true? I would. And then – and we just kept not wanting to do it. And I think then a couple things happened like simultaneously. One is you, I think, as you all have noticed, we're big pattern watchers here, right? Like a pattern emerges and we're like, well, what does it mean? So Sarah noticed a pattern. And then I was the one who was like, we should talk about this on like the Day of the Dead, essentially, which is it's not this episode is airing on October 30th. But I was like, let's wait to do it around this time. You wanted a thin veil. I did. I didn't. I did. So I was like, listen, Speaker 5 (9:50) we're Speaker 4 (9:50) just going to be as Speaker 5 (9:50) close to the other Speaker 4 (9:51) side as we could get. Speaker 5 (9:52) I did. Speaker 5 (9:54) So, I mean, I've talked about it on the podcast a little bit. Like, I've sort of mentioned it now and then. Because I started to notice that there was a growing number of romances set in and around funeral parlors. Like, mortuaries, morgues, funeral homes, casket makers. Like, a bunch of things that just felt like, this is not a world. that I have ever seen in a romance, in romance before. There's like one Tessa Bailey book. It came out two weeks after the, after the shutdown, right? Yeah, but I mean, she didn't write it in the, I mean, she writes fast, so, but I don't think she wrote it that fast. But like, like, I couldn't think, I mean, all those years of categories where like all those weird jobs existed and I couldn't think of any. And please, if you are out there and like you can think of a category from the 80s or 90s that touched on this, like I would be really interested in it. I just couldn't find any evidence that we had Speaker 4 (11:02) ever been in funeral homes. And Speaker 5 (11:05) it makes sense in a lot of ways, right? Like because grief, not grief. death is sort of the antithesis of love in a lot of ways. Like, how do you have a happily ever after if you're like surrounded by death? And certainly I could think of romances where the hero was death or the hero, like paranormal romances where we sort of like cut into that world. But the actual contemporary and in some cases historical romance that was in and around like The business of death was really interesting to me. And it was so obvious to Speaker 4 (11:42) me. Yeah. Speaker 5 (11:43) That it was Speaker 4 (11:44) pandemic related. Speaker 5 (11:46) Though I looked in. I want to say almost almost all I want to say all but I think it was just almost all I searched for both covid and pandemic when I went back for, you know, to put this together for the podcast and nobody mentions it. So it's like. The pandemic happened, COVID happened in real life, but in these books, it's like the specter of the pandemic is there. Speaker 4 (12:11) Sarah has been noticing this or Speaker 5 (12:13) like kind Speaker 4 (12:13) of Speaker 5 (12:13) keeping this list for probably a while. Speaker 2 (12:16) Because it's Speaker 5 (12:16) also such a weird thing, I should say. I mean, like anybody who listens to the podcast knows this. I'm really interested in weird shit in romance. Like when people do weird stuff. Speaker 4 (12:27) Right. That's what I want to read. Let Speaker 5 (12:29) alone where all Speaker 4 (12:29) of Speaker 5 (12:29) a Speaker 4 (12:29) sudden everybody's doing the same weird thing altogether. Exactly. Speaker 5 (12:32) Two, Speaker 4 (12:32) three years after the pandemic. Speaker 5 (12:33) I have another one. I have another. Another thing that now I'm like collecting works, I'm collecting books on too, that I'm going to keep a secret from everyone, but I'll tell you later. Speaker 4 (12:42) So Sarah and I have been clocking this, like keeping track of it. I would be like, look at this one or sending them to her. And the reason it has taken us so long to get here is because I don't want to read these books. Speaker 5 (12:58) Right. We knew, well, because I will, I'll also talk about this when we talk about the books, but like. What's super weird about these books is almost all of them have embalming or some sort of like death. Yeah. Like the actual work. Yeah. Speaker 4 (13:17) Function of death business on the page. Yeah. And I am just like not interested in these books and not just like not interested. I don't want to read them. Yeah. Specifically not interested. Specifically like, and look, I don't feel really bad admitting that because not for Jen. Yeah, not for Jen. And it's funny because I spent a lot of time thinking like, it's not like I'm any stranger to like violence or dead bodies in books. I read Reacher for God's sakes. But I think there is a big difference between dead bodies and corpses is where it broke down for me. Let's dig into this because I've Speaker 5 (13:52) also said recently that I've. you know, you and I have talked about Butcher and Blackbird, Speaker 4 (13:57) which I read and like, oh, yeah, I quit. I quit on the first paragraph. Body horror is not for me. But Speaker 5 (14:03) what's interesting about these books is it's not horror. Speaker 4 (14:06) It's just like Speaker 5 (14:07) now we're embalming this body. That is body horror to me. I want to just underscore that for listeners like. It's not the same as Butcher and Blackbird. It's like a much more, it's a workplace romance in a lot of ways. Like this is, we could be, I don't know, making espresso, but instead we're embalming this body. It's a curious, I'm not like saying that to like win you over. What I'm just putting it Speaker 4 (14:34) out there that like when we talk about these books, it's weird. This is going to be weird for you. So everybody knows like in my day job, I'm a teacher, right? One of the things that I have really come to believe over the course of my teaching career is that there's a lot of things we do to teach people to like read, like read past their own, right? Like I don't, their feelings of like, this is not for me, not for Jen. And part of me is like, sure, that's fine and appropriate, right? Like, you have to try things and, you know, that's how it works. But I do think that I also feel really strongly like if you know something is not for you, it's just not going to speak, especially in genre fiction, right? It's not going to speak to you. And I think the difference to me is like, I would never say these books should not exist. I would never say they're not romances. I would never say that it's, you know what I mean? I just know I'm like, I don't want to read about it. I don't want to write. I don't want to read about embalming. full stop i did not watch nip tuck or no not six feet under the movie about six feet under see that Speaker 5 (15:45) was like my favorite show when i was on i'm really fascinated by this Speaker 4 (15:50) as like a thing For a long time, for months and months, it has been kind of a like, is Sarah going to have to do this episode with somebody else? But we do want to talk about Speaker 5 (16:00) - We wouldn't have Speaker 4 (16:00) done it if you hadn't figured out a way. I would have eventually figured out a way to like give this list to somebody. Speaker 5 (16:07) This week's episode of Faded Mates is sponsored by Brianna Bancroft, author of A Dash of Desire series, book one, The Businesswoman and the Bartender, book two, The Librarian and the Mechanic, and book three, The Maestro and the Speaker 4 (16:22) Roofer. So as you can already tell, each of these features a couple where they have... Essentially, like there's a little bit of class differences like built into the system where the woman is always the one who's like a bit of higher class. And those can be really interesting and fun reads. And each of these is also a novella where the couple, the people in the couple have. gotten out of recent relationships. They're in their 30s. They're just like looking for love with someone new. So in The Businesswoman and the Bartender, New Yorker April Markham has gone to Seattle for a business trip and hits it off and hits it with handsome bartender Nick. In The Librarian and the Mechanic, Mallory has just gotten out of an emotionally abusive marriage when her car breaks down and along comes Joel Foster. to fix it and fix her right up. And in The Maestro and the Roofer, Mia has had a legendary fall from grace. So she books herself into a seaside cottage in order to like kind of get her groove back. When a storm blows in, handsome roofer Travis Flynn shows up to cover her and cover that roof. So these flings are going to grow into something deeper. And because each of these books is only about 80 pages and priced at 99 cents, you can just like dive in, have the full romance just like unfold right in front of you and then like move on to the next great book. Speaker 5 (17:54) If this sounds like exactly what you need this week, just short bites of delicious romance. You can find these three novellas on sale right now in ebook or with your monthly subscription to Kindle Unlimited. In podcasting apps that support it, you can click on the chapter title right now to be taken to buy the book. Thanks to Brianna Bancroft for sponsoring this week's episode. Speaker 4 (18:22) Earlier this summer, I started noticing a pattern in paranormal and paranormals, not like ghost, ghost paranormals, I guess, which is, first of all, an uptick of them. And don't get me wrong. There's this is a difference. There have always been romances with ghosts that I can go back a long way. But the difference to me, it seemed, was that a lot of the ghostly books of the past were that like the place was haunted and the people, you know, like, I don't know, the ghost was sort of like this like presence that they were either afraid of or they had to learn not to be afraid of or whatever. But what I was started to notice this year was that a recurring plot that I saw happening in three or four books that I read in a span of like. six or eight weeks maybe. Not that they all came out together, but that's just like I started when I read them or like I was reading early copies of some or whatever was a very specific plot where the ghosts were on page. Speaker 4 (19:32) And it was the job of the human main characters to show these ghosts were like trapped in our reality. And it was the job of the people on page to help the ghosts move on to the afterlife, their own afterlife. That's something about, and I was like, I think this is probably doing the same work. but on an emotional, like a different, in a different emotional register. And so we then started calling this episode, which we agreed we would do around Day of the Dead, right? Yes. Like I see dead people. Yeah. Right. And because it's just kind of like a similar, like a very similar vibe. So it was just like a way for both of us, I think, to approach maybe like work romance is doing around the pandemic and like the different ways that that is presenting itself. Now, I. Before we do that, I want to say I think that there are other ways the pandemic is presenting itself in romance. Let's talk about those things. I just think like the uptick of cancer is a plot or as people dealing with a sick or dying relative. Right. Like, I think. you know, just grief in general kind of appearing more often as like something characters can explicitly say that they are dealing with. Right. So I think like those things are also probably part of the pandemic and romance piece. But I just think it's also not as. as interesting maybe as like what these books might be doing to us in person. Yeah. Speaker 5 (21:11) And I think this is a place to talk about humor because I think that a lot of these books call themselves rom-coms and I want to, you know, caveat, caveat, fate of mates caveat about rom-coms, right? Like invariably, like they're not that funny, right? But I think, I think what it is, is they're not funny in a way that I would refer to them as comedy, right? Like, People, I think, like, I think sometimes my books can be funny, but, like, they're not calm. They're not calm, right? Like, they're just, there's, like, a funny banter, a funny turn of phrase. Like, Speaker 4 (21:47) there's a difference, right, between comedy and not. Speaker 5 (21:50) I do think, and this is also related to the fact that I have literally just, like, my next book is a book about death, right? Like, a father dies and a family comes together for one week after he dies. And part of what's in that book is a lot, I hope that book, there are moments of, like, very extreme levity. Because the depths of emotion that come with dealing with death. Right. Yeah. Somehow do kind of unlock this level of humor that this like you're sort of unable to. It's like you laugh when you're uncomfortable and there is something very uncomfortable about death. And so what I found is when reading these books, I found that the characters themselves were very funny. Like and I think. I'm not going to talk about The Undertaking of Heart and Mercy because we've talked about it a lot on the podcast, but I think that's a good example of a book that like really like tackles the pandemic, right? With like the zombies outside, Heart is a zombie killer, and then Mercy runs an undertaking business, right? And she is an undertaker. And that is a funny book. The banter between them is very funny. And so I think like, There is something going on here where I think anybody who has been through like the process of dealing with the death of a loved one understands like how fucking crazy those like weeks and months after, not months, those like really intense days and weeks after death can like be weirdly funny. And like all these books. sort of did that for me in an interesting way. So again, like, because I think we're dealing with some of like the most base of human stuff, right? Like death makes us all uncomfortable, but we are surrounded by it. And we were all, no, let me clarify. We all experienced it. We all experience it at some point or another in our lives. But during the pandemic, we were all so close to it. Even if we didn't lose somebody who we really knew, there was that specter of it. Like death felt close in a way. And so I think these books are really doing something interesting emotionally around like what actually is physically happening to us when we are that. close to mortality. Speaker 4 (24:36) Like, does every book that I read for this episode work? No, I'm not going to talk about every book I read Speaker 5 (24:42) for this episode. I'm Speaker 4 (24:43) going to talk about however many I talk about, and there are many more, is what I'm saying. I think my subset is a lot smaller. I tried to cast a wider net and see if I could find more. And I think in some ways it was just really tricky because there are so many like i said ghosts are like no there there are ghosts in romance there always have been right like i can think of ghost books back to you know whenever so it was trying to really then like sort through ones that had a very specific plot and so what i found myself doing was really like just like focusing on the ones that essentially like Well, if they were traditionally published, they came out in the past, essentially, 18 months. And if they were indie published, then I was really just trying. I was like actually just like kind of read and tried a lot of samples and then like rejected some right where it sounded good. But then it ended up just being, you know, kind of not what I was looking for. Although I will let you know, Sarah, one of the things I did discover is there are a. more than you would think a number of books where the heroine is a ghost and she essentially like falls in with like a bunch of other ghosts and they have like ghost orgies and i was like fascinating Speaker 5 (26:11) yeah Speaker 4 (26:13) like yeah and i was like oh weird but okay yeah sure right and i in my brain was calling these the ghostly banging books ghost orgy yeah but so i think i probably have less books to talk about and and that's okay but i i did not think any of them were particularly funny but i i almost never think romance is funny. So like that comedy question, maybe I'm just like the wrong person to gauge that. I think for me, the interesting vector of discussion is the books I found most effective were the ones where the characters, in order to like help the ghosts move on, had to reckon with the way that they themselves shared. qualities that the ghosts have Speaker 5 (27:03) right Speaker 4 (27:03) so