England long resisted the Continental dread, but it was invaded by French premature-burial pamphlets in the early 19th century and soon fell prey. The most noteworthy result of John Bull's flirtation with burial reform seems to have been the overheated scribblings of one John Snart, whose "Thesaurus of Horror; or, The Charnel-House Explored" Bondeson describes as "the most ludicrous and gruesome book ever to appear in its particular literary genre." This is a large claim, but the passages excerpted bear it out. Mr. Snart was especially fond of the repeated exclamation mark: "And burst his eyeballs in the vain attempt!!!" "The Baron had been BURIED ALIVE!!!" "He therefore, in a fit of desperation, had dashed his brains out against the wall!!!" "A fermentable mass of murdered, senseless, decomposing matter!!!"

The premature burial scare was introduced into America not by medical science but by popular 19th century writers like Edgar Allan Poe, who was obsessed with the subject, returning to it again and again. The theme is featured in "The Premature Burial," which, thanks to a ridiculous surprise ending, is one of the master's weaker efforts, but also in such masterpieces as "The Cask of Amontillado," with its frighteningly implacable narrator Montresor, who walls up his enemy Fortunato (whose "thousand injuries" we have only Montresor's dubious word for) underground; "The Black Cat," featuring a feline that is buried alive along with a corpse; and "The Fall of the House of Usher," in which the sister of Roderick Usher breaks loose from her premature tomb to doom her brother. Perhaps the subject's most bizarre appearance is in the unspeakably dreadful story "Berenice," in which the strange, dispirited narrator, Egaeus, becomes obsessed with his frail cousin Berenice's teeth. After he learns of her death, he is sitting in his library when a servant bursts in to tell him that Berenice's grave has been violated and her disfigured body found still alive. The servant suddenly points to Egaeus, who is spattered with blood; Egaeus in horror grasps at a little box next to him, which falls to the floor revealing, in one of the most chilling last lines in literary history, "some instruments of dental surgery, intermingled with thirty-two small, white and ivory-looking substances that were scattered to and fro about the floor."

Stories by Poe and others in magazines like Blackwood's spread the creepy gospel far and wide. The leaders of the American burial reform movement were frequently spiritualists whose dread was exacerbated by their belief that the soul could leave the body and wander abroad: How could any signs of physical death be reliable under these circumstances? One of their number, a Dr. Franz Hartman, is perhaps the most terrifying-looking scientist in the annals of medicine -- a maniacal, staring fellow with cavernous rings under his eyes who looks like he just escaped from an asylum for the criminally insane. "There were links also to the proponents of teetotalism and vegetarianism, to the organized spiritualists and quacks, and to the suffragettes and proponents of rational female dress," notes Bondeson, not explaining the connection between the anti-corset league and burial reformers. Obviously, many of the ideas put forward by this odd collection of reformers, who were in the main antiscientific reactionaries, were specious in the extreme, but Bondeson does credit them with pointing out the cruelty of 19th century vivisectionists.

Bondeson concludes his book by asking whether people really were buried alive, and whether they still might be. He pooh-poohs the extravagant claims made by burial reformers (some of whom asserted that one in 10 people was prematurely buried) but notes that there are a few genuine cases on record. During cholera epidemics, in particular, he notes, the risk of premature burial was great. "It must have occurred regularly, but probably not frequently, that living people were buried by mistake," he concludes. As for whether people are still being buried alive, he concludes that they probably are. In third world nations, the risk is greater, but even in Western countries, where legal safeguards exist, misdiagnosis sometimes occurs. He cites cases "of gross incompetence on the part of the attending physician and in several twentieth-century cases of severe hypothermia after intoxication with CNS [central nervous system] depressants." But the risk, clearly, is minuscule.

Throughout his stroll through the rotting byways of his subject, Bondeson has been a rather genial, if reserved, host, but at the very end he plants a nasty Calvinist elbow in the ribs of his readers. Pondering why the fear of premature burial, after a brief revival in the 1970s spurred by the new whole-brain medical criteria of death, has largely faded out, he writes, "Nor is the prevailing present-day lifestyle in the United States and large parts of the Western world, set by egotistical, hyperactive people obsessed with amassing money and luxury goods, conducive to gloomy contemplation of death or fear of a possible life after burial."

Ouch! It's almost enough to make an egotistical, hyperactive, luxury-good-pursuing American feel guilty for laughing his way through this weird and wonderful little tome. But not quite.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"