Mary Roach says in the introduction of her book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers that she writes about what she finds fascinating. She used to be a travel writer, but apparently that became too boring, so she turned to dead bodies. Quite the switch.

It was a good move for her, though, because Stiff went on to become a New York Times Bestseller, albeit a grotesque and stomach-turning one.

In Stiff, Roach chronicles what happens to our bodies after we die. And for this book, no detail is too small. She divides her narrative into chapters organized by category: bodies used as car-crash dummies, bodies left to rot in the sun, bodies dissected by medical students. She even starts Stiff with a little medical history that discusses the use of dead bodies in early medicine.

This book is not for the faint of heart and is probably not something to be read during lunch. It’s sort of like the reading equivalent of watching a horror movie.

Thankfully, Roach’s irreverent sense of humor and sharp writing style turn a book that could be either too scientifically dry or too disgusting into something quite readable.

Being a college student, one part of Stiff I found particularly relevant was the third chapter called “Life After Death.” In this chapter, Rowan visits a University of Tennessee Medical Center research facility. The describes this facility as “a lovely forested grove with squirrels leaping in the branches of hickory trees and birds calling and patches of green grass where people lie on their backs in the sun.” It sounds a lot like the Quad on a hot day.

The bodies lying on the lawn of the UT Medical Center, however, are naked, dead bodies. The research facility studies cadavers as they decompose in order to “advance the science of criminal forensics.”

In this chapter, Roach’s readers learn valuable bits of information like “it can be said that dead people fart;” that after three weeks of decomposing, the internal organs of a dead body are the color and consistency of chicken soup; or that “if you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse,” you will discover that the feeding maggots sound like popping Rice Krispies.

For me, Roach’s book provided perhaps a little too much information, though in a very entertaining way. Some of the details were hard to stomach and explicit information about animal testing was downright sick.

I can’t deny, however, that I appreciated learning some of the things I did from Stiff, in preparation for my death. It’s good to know that, for example, “donated skin that isn’t used for, say, grafting onto burn victims may be processed and used cosmetically to plump up wrinkles and aggrandize penises.”

Stiff is a recommended read for those with hearty stomachs. Those who like a little less graphic detail may still want to pick up Roach’s equally entertaining but less disgusting book about ghosts and the afterlife, Spook.