Casket for Sale (Only Used Once)

I’ll admit, I side-eyed the title *Casket for Sale (Only Used Once)* at first—it screams *trying too hard*, right? Wrong. Five minutes into Joe Hempel’s narration, I was hooked, and by the 30-minute mark, I was pausing to text a friend, *“You have to listen to this garbage fire of a book—it’s *glorious*.”* Hempel’s performance is a masterclass in comedic timing; he nails Andrew Mayhem’s mix of exhaustion and delusional confidence, and his voice for the book’s *particular* corpse is a standout. The guy should get a medal for selling lines like *“That’s not how necrophilia works!”* without cracking up. Strand’s plot is a Rube Goldberg machine of disasters: a botched robbery, a corpse that refuses to stay dead (or shut up), and a cast of idiots who somehow keep outsmarting themselves. The humor lands because it’s *specific*—not just random gross-outs, but callbacks and escalating absurdity (a running gag about a missing finger had me wheezing). That said, the middle act drags slightly; Strand leans *hard* into the chaos, and a few set pieces overstay their welcome. And while Hempel’s energy is infectious, his female voices occasionally veer into caricature. But these are quibbles. If you love horror that doesn’t take itself seriously—or, hell, if you just want to hear a man argue with a dead body for six hours—this is your audiobook. Just don’t listen in public unless you’re prepared for weird looks.