Books about death

I've recently come across (but haven't yet read) two books about death - Stiff: the curious lives of human cadavers and Necropolis: London and its dead. I presume there must be zillions out there. Any good ones? Any humorous one out there? Non-fiction, fiction, whatever...

(edited to fix touchstones)

The classic is The American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford ... a look the American funeral industry ... and The loved one by Evelyn Waugh kind of tackles the same subject, but with black humor.

I found "Stiff" quite interesting but in the fiction realm a book I enjoyed very much was Being Dead by Jim Crace. Basically an oldish couple are killed in the sand dunes and it is some time before the bodies are discovered. The process of decay is described very graphically. Another book of his that I liked was Quarantine. Again a very simple "plot" (if you could call it that) but wonderful writing.

It depends what angle you're looking at it from.

There's also How We Die : Reflections on Life's Final Chapter, The Denial of Death, The Year of Magical Thinking, On Death and Dying, The Book Thief, A Grief Observed, etc.

Vollmann's opening essay in his abridged Rising Up and Rising Down : Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means is excellent.

"Any humorous one out there?"

Mort Reaper Man et al by Terry Pratchett

What happens when Death doesn't, is the basic premise. Very funny.

And not so much a book explicitly about death, but rather more obliquely about negative space, I'd recommend Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. An absolutely stunning book.

Nonfiction: Marilyn Johnson's The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries is a really fascinating and funny book about obituary readers and writers. Judith Viorst's Necessary Losses, while not specifically about dying, is nonetheless an intelligent and important book about smaller acts of letting go.

For fiction, I agree, Housekeeping is a beautifully solemn novel; her latest, Gilead, touches on similar themes (a man in his 80s, about to die, writes a letter to his 7-year-old son.) Another novel that deals quite blatantly with death is Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, a very grave and beautiful novel that deals with themes of death, bioethics, cloning, etc.

Finally, Terry Tempest Williams' memoir, Refuge: An Unnatural History of family and Place is one of the most moving meditations on the connectedness of family and then natural world that I have ever read.