And All the Earth a Grave

In an era when we treat everything as a product, C. C. MacApp imagined the logical endpoint: what if death itself became consumerized? This razor-sharp 1963 satire opens with a bookkeeping error at a coffin company that accidentally launches the most successful advertising campaign in history. What begins as a corporate mistake spirals into a national obsession. Coffins appear under Christmas trees. The wealthy commission handcrafted mahogany caskets as conversation pieces. Funeral homes pivot to lifestyle consulting. Soon, dying becomes the ultimate status signal, and society descends into a grotesque celebration of mortality that makes our actual death-avoidance culture look quaint by comparison. MacApp's genius lies in depicting the transformation with deadpan bureaucratic precision, letting the absurdity speak for itself. The horror creeps in gradually: first as comedy, then as something closer to prophecy. This is a book that predicted the commodification of everything, from healthcare to personal identity, decades before we had the vocabulary to describe what was happening. It endures because it reads less like science fiction and more like documentary. Darkly funny, unsettlingly prescient, and ruthlessly intelligent.