Happy Death Club: Essays on Death, Grief & Bereavement Across Cultures

By Naomi Westerman

Playwright Naomi Westerman was an anthropology grad student studying death rituals around the world when her whole family died, turning death from the academic to the deeply personal. She struggled with grief and talking about, particularly as a young woman, realising while death is everywhere in our culture, grief is harder to find in specialist ways.

This Inkling combines academic study with memoir to discuss the popularity of murder as entertainment in true crime podcasts; women working in the death industry; Naomi's love of horror and what it's like writing horror movies for a living when your mum was maybe murdered; the rise of death peer support groups; and death rituals in other countries. Happy Death Club provides a frank, touching and sometimes hilarious look at death, grief, and bereavement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 404 Ink
• Release date: Jun 20, 2024
• ISBN: 9781912489893

Naomi Westerman

Naomi Westerman is a playwright and former anthropologist. As an anthropologist, Naomi studied death rituals around the world, also working on mental health and gender. She changed careers and became a professional writer in 2015, and since then her work has been widely performed at theatres in London and across the UK and internationally, including in the West End and off-Broadway. Her first TV series 'The Faulty Elephants', a comedy-drama about the world's first all-disabled criminal heist gang, is currently in development. She is a recipient of the Royal Society of Literature Award, the Michael Grandage Futures Bursary, the Derby Theatre / In Good Co Mid-Career Commission Award, and was a finalist for the Theatre Uncut Political Playwriting Award at the Young Vic. Her play 'Batman' is currently running in London, community project 'Mudlarking' opens at the Bush Theatre in March 2023, and her play 'Puppy' runs Oct-Nov 2023 in London. Happy Death Club is her first non-fiction book.

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Cover of Happy Death Club by Naomi Westerman

Happy Death Club

Published by 404 Ink Limited

www.404Ink.com

@404Ink

All rights reserved © Naomi Westerman, 2024.

The right of Naomi Westerman to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without first obtaining the written permission of the rights owner, except for the use of brief quotations in reviews.

Please note: Some references include URLs which may change or be unavailable after publication of this book. All references within endnotes were accessible and accurate as of May 2024 but may experience link rot from there on in.

Editing: Kirstyn Smith

Typesetting: Laura Jones-Rivera

Cover design: Luke Bird

Co-founders and publishers of 404 Ink:

Heather McDaid & Laura Jones-Rivera

Print ISBN: 978-1-912489-88-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-912489-89-3

404 Ink acknowledges and is thankful for support from Creative Scotland in the publication of this title.

Happy Death Club

Essays on Death, Grief & Bereavement Across Cultures

Naomi Westerman

This book is dedicated to my enemies.

One day all of you will be dead.

In memory of my mum and dad.

And for J – I’m really glad neither of us is dead yet.

Contents

Content note

Spoilers

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Rat King of South London

Chapter 2: The Ashes World Tour

Chapter 3: The Price of Death, or Benedict Cumberbatch’s Taxidermied Corpse

Horror and Feminism and Grief, Oh My!

Chapter 5: Death and the Maiden

Chapter 6: Fear and Loathing in Mexico City

Chapter 7: Your Murder is Sponsored by Hello Fresh

Chapter 8: Batman

Chapter 9: Happy Death Club

Conclusion

References

Additional references of interest

Acknowledgements

About the Author

About the Inklings series

Content note

Happy Death Club contains repeated mentions of: death, visceral gore, human remains, cannibalism, suicidal ideation, murder, and more.

Spoilers

There are spoilers in the first half of Chapter 4 for the following films: Happy Death Day, Happy Death Day 2U, Friday the 13th, Scream, Get Out, Psycho, Shaun of the Dead, Don’t Look Now, Lake Mungo, A Dark Song, A Quiet Place, The Witch, mother!, Goodnight Mommy, The Haunting of Julia, Antichrist, Hereditary, We Are Still Here, Pet Sematary, The Changeling, Prevenge

There is also a spoiler in Chapter 7 for Netflix’s American Nightmare.

Introduction

I started writing this book in North East Wales in midwinter. The day I started writing, staring at a blank notebook and thinking about putting words in it, I took a bus across Snowdonia. Coming back, the bus pulled into a garage in a village halfway up a mountain. The bus emptied. The driver left, but with engine running and lights still on. The sign on the bus said ‘Aberystwyth’ so I sat, and sat, and nearly gave the bus driver a heart attack when he returned and saw small ghostly figure. I’d missed the last transfer, low bridges requiring a change from one number 72 to a completely different 72 that you’re just supposed to know about, that everyone in rural Wales does know about. He adopted me and took me into the cosy rabbit warren of the bus drivers’ office, which was improbably full of fruit. The driver explained it was ‘Fruity Wednesday’, a health initiative created by First Bus to combat the tendency their drivers have to have heart attacks and die. Once a week, all bus depots and garages are sent crates of free fruit. The bus drivers do not like Fruity Wednesday. They would rather have proper paid time off. As they filled my pockets with satsumas and plums, a rescue plan developed. If the last train to Aber leaves at 10pm from X which is Y miles away, what grade did I get in my maths GCSE?

I was chauffeured by private bus to a local pub and left with strict instructions not to move until 9.40pm, when I was to walk to the bus stop and tell the driver, ‘Big Dave says, Go really fast to catch the last train from Machynlleth.’ Then I realised that I’m a grown-up and can just call a cab, which is when the adventure really started. Running in the dark to the village’s only cash point, I met with the village’s only cab driver, who in friendly Welsh manner asked me what I was doing there. I told him I was writing a book about death and grief, and the way grief can bring people together. He said, empathically, ‘I know all about that!’, the exclamation mark so palpable as to demand further questioning. He told me about the death of his teenage son in a car crash a decade before. That 323 people had passed through his front door between the death and the funeral; 1,200 at the funeral. The mark this loss had left on him, on the village, still visible years later. The community rallying around.

I don’t know why it should surprise me that on the first day of starting to write this book I should meet someone so profoundly affected by a loss. It’s a universal experience, even if it’s one we don’t always talk about. But it felt meaningful, somehow. This taciturn Welshman who told me he only read books about sporting heroes (but would ‘give mine a go’), opening up to a lost English woman in the back of his cab racing down unlit lanes that freezing December night. Sharing his grief, the love and strength of his community, with an outsider. Meeting this man felt like kismet, made me feel that writing a book about death could be meaningful.

I had a fairly chaotic upbringing and left education before my thirteenth birthday, spending time homeless as a teen, then sat exams as an adult before starting university as a mature student. I progressed to an MSc in anthropology, a second MSc in neuroscience, and started a PhD. I found my niche in the darker aspects of academia: mental illness, gender and death. I wrote papers on endocannibalism in the Amazon, on what dead animals say about living humans. I studied funeral rites in China and grappled with anthropology’s colonial past. I started working at the Natural History Museum in London, surrounded by dead things.

And then my aunt died. Her name was Jean and she was born brain damaged. My grandmother took care of her 24/7, for sixty years. Then my grandmother Edie died, nearly ninety, at a funeral where her siblings brought Tupperware and fought over who’d take the cakes home from the wake. Like ninepins they all fell. My dad Roy dropped dead of an