Some Essays Available Online:
“Five Cemetery Road Trips for the Ultimate Taphohile” on Mental Floss.
“Four Graves for Harvey Milk” on the Cemetery Club.
“Cemetery Sights: Norton, Emperor of the United States” on Legacy.com.
“Poblenou Cemetery: The Kiss of Death” on GothicBeauty.com.
Hear me read my true story “The Ghost of Friends” on Jennifer’s Ghost.
Read “Curiosity and the Cat” about my first visit to a graveyard in Japan at Cemetery Travel.
Now Available in Book or eBook:
199 CEMETERIES TO SEE BEFORE YOU DIE, published by Black Dog & Leventhal in 2017, is a full-color hard cover exploration of 199 cemeteries around the world, from the prehistoric dolmens of County Clare to the graves of the 47 Ronin in Tokyo to the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires. It’s time to stop and smell the roses.
WISH YOU WERE HERE: ADVENTURES IN CEMETERY TRAVEL was published by Automatism Press in 2017. Come along as I explore 50 graveyards in 35 essays, illustrated with photographs from my travels. Many of the essays originally appeared in Gothic.Net, Morbid Outlook, Travelers’ Tales: Paris, and Morbid Curiosity magazine.
Part travel memoir, part cemetery history, the book is available in paperback and ebook from Amazon.
I have an essay called “Read It and Sell It” in SELF-PROMO STORIES: AUTHORS’ BOLDEST, CLEVEREST, AND WACKIEST STRATEGIES TO SELL THEIR OWN BOOKS, edited by Valerie Frankel, which you can read for free from Smashwords: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/683123. Contributors include Beth Barany, Emerian Rich, J. Malcolm Stewart, and many others.
“Touched by a Ghost,” an excerpt from my essay in the out-of-print collection Haunted Mansion Project: Year One, appears in THE HORROR ADDICT’S GUIDE TO LIFE, edited by David Watson and published by HorrorAddicts.net in April 2015. Other contributors include Emerian Rich, Sumiko Saulson, H.E. Roulo, Laurel Anne Hill, and many more.
ALL YOU NEED IS MORBID, a collection of my morbid travel essays, appeared on Wattpad.com. Join me and my husband Mason as we explore the world from San Francisco to Japan by way of Paris, Prague, and Pompeii. The book was chosen for the Featured Nonfiction list on Wattpad in August 2014. In February 2015, it won one of the first ever HQ Love Watty awards.
The revised and expanded paperback edition will be out in January 2020.
MORBID CURIOSITY CURES THE BLUES: TRUE STORIES OF THE UNSAVORY, UNWISE, UNORTHODOX, AND UNUSUAL contains my essays “No Spill Blood” and “The Mortician’s Gift,” along with dozens of sidebars I wrote for the magazine.
From Scribner: “This is a unique and original compendium of completely true stories first published in the cult magazine Morbid Curiosity, “a Reader’s Digest of the dark side,” according to San Francisco Weekly. For ten years, Morbid Curiosity was a one-of-a-kind underground magazine that gained a devoted following for its celebration of absurd, gross, and unusual tales — all true — submitted from contributors across the country and around the world.”
“… this book reads authentic; after most of the entries are follow-ups, either personal anecdotes or data for fuller context comprehension. Loren Rhoads’s own commentary after R.N. Taylor’s ‘A Night In The House of Dr. Moreau’ demonstrated levels a mind can reach to rationalize horrifying circumstances.” — She Never Sleeps
PILLS, THRILLS, CHILLS, AND HEARTACHE: ADVENTURES IN THE FIRST PERSON contains my essay “Anarchy in Calaveras County.”
Thirty-seven writers. One rule: Each story must be told in the first person. Clint Catalyst (Cottonmouth Kisses) and Michelle Tea (The Chelsea Whistle) bring together what can only be described as a dream cast of literature’s new avant-garde. Catalyst calls the end product “a wonderful sampling of oddities, like a dangerous box of chocolates or an unmarked prescription bottle.” These stories offer scary, funny, chaotic, moving, poignant, intimate glimpses into lives on the fringe.
TRAVELERS’ TALES: SAN FRANCISCO includes my essay “Going In” about the Tactile Dome, a pitch-black maze at the old Exploratorium.
San Francisco appeared instantly — just add gold and stir! — when precious ore was discovered in the nearby hills in 1848. All of that rich history is captured in Travelers’ Tales: San Francisco along with clear portraits of today’s city. In these true stories, you will explore the North Beach of the Beat era and beyond with Herbert Gold, discover true romance on a cable car with Michele Anna Jordan, uncover the real Mission district with John Krich, marvel at the city’s wild light with Andrei Codrescu, gumshoe through Sam Spade’s San Francisco with Don Freeman, and learn what it means to be a “quintessential San Franciscan” with the late Herb Caen.
Bibliographical information:
The complete list of my travel publications is here.
The complete list of my published personal essays is here.
