An embalmer haunted by the death of his lover pulls apart his relationship and his funeral home to escape the pain of grief—but who is he without the dead? Queer literary fiction meets gothic horror in this debut novel from a former funeral professional.
My debut novel The Restorative Artist will be published by Lucent Dreaming 17 September 2026. Preorder now from your bookshop, including UK Bookshop.org and Amazon.co.uk, or direct from my publisher Lucent Dreaming. If you’re not from the UK, Blackwells includes shipping in the cost of the book – check it out here. You can also add it to your TBR list on Goodreads.
For Booksellers: available to order through Booksource, Gardners, and Books Council of Wales. One sheet and press kit available here.
Early NetGalley Reviews
★★★★★
This isn’t an easy book, emotionally, but I couldn’t stop reading or thinking about it. The characters are so well written, so three-dimensional. The setting is so clear, and unusual for the reader but natural for the POV character, and when the POV perspective starts to warp through illness it twists everything with it. The queerness was bedrock to the story, not an afterthought or scaffolding; there would be no story without it, but it isn’t THE story. It’s in everything. At its core, it’s about healing – unevenly, with great difficulty, against your will maybe, both physically and emotionally. And love, of course. There’s no loss without it.
★★★★★
It was beautiful and heartbreaking, and even though death is waiting on every page you’ll be hard pressed to find a better example of the importance of staying alive.
Perfect for fans of Andrew Joseph White, CG Drews, and NBCs Hannibal
★★★★★
…beautifully written and […] a really nice mix of spooky, somber, emotional and hopeful
About The Restorative Artist
Graham has built his life around the dead. He’s a talented embalmer, the devoted director of his own funeral home, and the guiding hand behind a small but respected team. After a corpse-carried illness forces him to reckon with his own mortality, Graham struggles to confront the lingering pain of a recent loss. Grief, he finds, is not so easily diagnosed, dissected, and named. It is not so easily cured.
Betrayed by his body and unable to accept the pain death has caused him, Graham loses faith in his profession and the person he’s become in its service. The past – which he imagines as a story of love and self-acceptance – becomes Graham’s refuge. But in the present, influenced by increasingly gruesome visions of the deceased, Graham withdraws from his funeral home with devastating consequences for himself, his new girlfriend, and his colleagues. As his life, and even his sanity, starts to fragment, Graham struggles to rediscover the importance of his work and the history that haunts him before he loses everything and everyone close to him.
The Restorative Artist is a dissection of memory and embodiment, set against the morbid decadence—and sterilising secrecy—of the US funeral industry. Through Graham’s confrontations with the spectre of his deceased lover, the horror of his work, and his uneasy relationship with his own transgender body, it dares to ask how anyone can continue in the face of loss.
