Ewwww. Ick. Gross. All that and more. This is a book about the people who clean up when grandpa is found decomposing in the hallway three weeks after he died in the house where he lived alone. This is the story of people who scrape the brains off the wall after junior blows his head off with a shotgun. This is the tale of the maggots and bugs and vomit inducing stench of decomposition. You think you've got stain removal challenges? You don't have stain removal challenges. Bioremediation technicians have stain removal challenges. And after they solve them they spend a long time in the shower before they go home to their families. This book tells their stories.

My spouse checked this book out for my son, almost 15, who likes CSI shows. I think on balance I'm glad he wasn't interested in it. We sometimes speak of the awfulness of death as an abstract matter, of nothingness and loss. This is the other awfulness of death, the more visceral sense, the horror of the dissolution of the human body in the summer heat and in turbine engines and at the end of a gun. This is about the noise that the maggots make and the chemistry of decomposition, about the HazMat suits and the problem of waste disposal.

The book itself reaches for more philosophical weight than the author seems capable of sustaining. His ruminations about death and life and the reasons for his own fascination with his subject are disorganized and rambling. His attempt to go beyond the clean-up problem and play forensic investigator on some of the crime scenes he encounters falls flat. But there was enough gruesome detail about the experiences of the employees of Aftermath Inc. to keep me turning the pages.

Now I can add "bioremediation technician" to the list of jobs I'm glad I never had, and never will have.