A Long Day at the End of the World
Due to her own burial phobia, Hendricks’ mother had her husband’s body disinterred in 1997 and sent to the Tri-State Crematory in Georgia. The cremains she received, though, were but crushed cement. In 2002, the garish truth splashed across headlines. Brent Marsh, the well-liked crematory owner, had been hoarding corpses—339 of them, to be exact—for five years for no apparent reason, stuffing them in bins and strewing them across the adjacent woods. “Body parts were found sticking out of the pits,” writes Hendricks, “like grisly plantings in a neglected garden.” Hendricks makes an overdue pilgrimage to this “hell camp,” along the way telling a story of displacement, not only of his father’s body but also of a childhood spent moving from town to town and an adulthood spent in a South to which he never belonged. In prose indicative of his poetry background, Hendricks skillfully interweaves the true-crime shocks of the Ed Gein–like scene with thoughtful asides on everything from Southern Baptists to Hernando de Soto to alchemy. A unique and affecting wander through some unwelcoming places. --Daniel Kraus