Author Talk: “Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book Of Death“
Circle Cinema
Tulsa
August 15, 2024
Spencer Henry and Madison Reyes do not fear death. They laugh in its face. Last week at Circle Cinema, at least a hundred spooky nerds were laughing with them.
Since 2021, Henry and Reyes have hosted a popular podcast that explores death and dying-related topics, everything from necrophilia and torture to funeral trends and end-of-life planning.
Sometimes, they do a live show. Not on this night, though. Henry and Reyes were in Tulsa promoting their new book, Obitchuary: The Big Hot Book of Death. Tickets for the event cost $30 and came with a copy of the book — which just hit #11 on the New York Times bestseller list — plus a chance to get it signed. It’s a fun coffee table book for the darkest of humors: Think Ripley’s Believe It or Not! meets Rotten.com with a sassy, irreverent twist.
“What do you even do at a book reading?” Henry asked the room. “Just, like, read the book?”
Excerpts were in fact read, including one of Henry’s favorite obituaries, but there was less actual reading than at a typical Magic City Books author talk. The podcasters seemed more comfortable talking to each other and the audience than reading from the page.
The dimly lit, almost eerie movie theater was the perfect setting to hear their macabre hot takes. Henry would like “funeral favors” (for example, the departed’s favorite recipe or a cute little plant) to become more of A Thing. Reyes made a compelling case for coffins over caskets: the hexagonal shape and the way it tapers is sexier.
Reyes went off-script and opened up about the publishing process, explaining the legalities of reprinting obituaries and the struggle of getting a blurb for their book’s front cover (neither Elvira nor John Waters came through). She and Henry gave candid advice when fans asked questions about their own creative projects.
Then someone asked what I’d been wondering: “Why Tulsa?” Their limited book tour mainly includes places that I (and probably you, too) consider “cooler” than here, like New York City and Seattle.
Henry smirked: “Why not Tulsa?”
The audience applauded. Oklahoma is exciting through the lens of The Outsiders or Twister, they said, and they both seemed a little bored with Los Angeles. Reyes said she’d like to come back and do a live episode of the podcast in Tulsa.
Also, they both emphasized, authors really don’t have any control over their book tour schedules. The night before, they were promoting the book in the basement of a sporting goods store — imagine something like a Dick’s — in San Francisco.
It’s obvious that Circle Cinema and Magic City Books are good collaborators in putting events like this together. They even figured out a system to maximize the efficiency of the waiting-to-get-your-book-signed line, which was really long. While waiting, people talked about old Obitchuary podcast episodes and shared their own related stories.
Death is hard to talk about. Dying is scary to think about. Grief is a bitch to process. For a couple of hours, Henry and Reyes turned mortality into a morbid trivia night, which left me with a strange comfort — and some ideas for writing more creative obits.
If Reyes and Henry ever return for a live Obitchuary show in Tulsa, they’ll definitely kill it.
Next from Magic City Books: Ted Chiang on “Technology & The Narrative Of The Self,” Lorton Performance Center, September 3.
