“A work of art as rich and subtle and unnerving as anything [Waugh] has ever done,” satirizing 1940s California and the Anglo-American cultural divide (New Yorker).
Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday—and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art. Waugh's dark and savage satire depicts a world where reputation, love, and death cost a very great deal.
“Fiendishly entertaining.”—New York Times
“As a piece of writing it is nearly faultless; as satire it is an act of devastation.” —The New Republic
“Mr. Waugh's treatment of his macabre material is uninhibited, and wickedly funny . . . as sadistic, playful, and decisive as a cat's paw on a mouse.” ―Alice S. Morris, New York Times Book Review
<DIV>Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966), whom <I>Time</I> called "one of the century's great masters of English prose," wrote several widely acclaimed novels as well as volumes of biography, memoir, travel writing, and journalism. Three of his novels, <I>A Handful of Dust, Scoop, </I>and<I> Brideshead Revisited,</I> were selected by the Modern Library as among the 100 best novels of the twentieth century.</DIV>