Book Reviews: The Loved One

“Tomorrow and on every anniversary as long as the Happier Hunting Ground existed a postcard would go to Mr. Joyboy: Your little Aimée is wagging her tail in heaven tonight, thinking of you."
- Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One

The Loved One by Evelyn Waugh is a short story and  morbid comedy that digs into Hollywood’s funeral industry complex. It’s fascinating to see the way Waugh handles the subject—sharp, satirical, and oddly prophetic. The book offers a glimpse of death as commodity, perhaps one of the earliest accounts of an industry that would soon take hold.

Waugh unabashedly illustrates the irony of death through his English protagonist, Dennis Barlow. To his fellow countrymen, Barlow has tarnished his dignity as an Englishman by working at the Happier Hunting Ground, a pet crematorium and cemetery—a setting that perfectly captures the novel’s dark humor. In contrast stands Mr. Joyboy, a sparkling yet suffocated employee of Whispering Glades—not a resting place for pets, but for humans. The two characters already feel at odds, but the tension sharpens when a love triangle emerges between them and Aimée, who prepares the dead for display at Whispering Glades.

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