The Commodification of Death in How High We Go in the Dark

Defining the Thematic Claim {#defining-the-thematic-claim}In How High We Go in the Dark, Sequoia Nagamatsu presents the commodification of death not as a side effect of the Arctic plague but as one of its defining industries. The novel's central claim is that when a society is overwhelmed by mass death, grief itself becomes a marketable commodity—packaged into services, priced in cryptocurrency, and sold back to the bereaved. Yet the book complicates this critique at every turn: the same commercial structures that exploit grief also provide the only available spaces for mourning, and the workers who staff these death industries often find genuine meaning in their labor. The result is not a simple indictment of capitalism but a portrait of a society that has outsourced its rituals of mourning to the market—and of the people who must live, work, and grieve inside that market.## The Elegy Hotel Economy {#the-elegy-hotel-economy}The most sustained depiction of death-as-business appears in Chapter 5, narrated by Dennis, a bereavement coordinator at an elegy hotel in San Francisco. The elegy hotels are exactly what their name suggests: hotels where families rent suites to sleep beside the corpses of plague victims awaiting cremation. The dead are processed through a three-part preservation system—sterilization, embalming, and antibacterial plasticizing—which, as Dennis puts it, buys families time to say goodbye while crematoriums struggle to keep up with demand. The language is telling: time is something you buy, and the hotel's job is to sell it.The commercial apparatus extends far beyond the hotel itself. Bereavement coordinators canvass neighborhoods door-to-door, marketing funerary services with slogans like Send off your loved ones in our luxury suites! and Low Interest Payment Plans Available! The novel introduces funerary tokens, a cryptocurrency specifically for death-related transactions, and an LED billboard in Union Square urges passersby: LIFE MUST PREVAIL. SPEND YOUR FUNERARY TOKENS ON THE LIVING. The absurdity of the slogan—spend your death-currency on life—captures the way the plague economy has blurred the line between mourning and consumption. Dennis's own holdings, fifty funerary inc tokens and a fraction of a Bitcoin, show that even the workers in the death industry are marginal participants in the economy they serve.Dennis's cynicism about his job is the reader's entry point into the critique. He jokes about two funerary urns for the price of one and hides bourbon in a defunct laundry room to escape the questions of the bereaved. But his coworker Val pushes back: Maybe we are company lackeys, but our potential clients have a basic right to process their grief with our help. Val's defense is not naive—she has lost her own husband—but it articulates a genuine tension. The elegy hotels are exploitative, but they also perform a function that the state and community have abandoned. When Dennis helps Mr. Leung, a man running underground funeral services for families who cannot afford the official channels, he reflects that once upon a time this was how we dealt with death. The commercial system has not replaced traditional ritual so much as absorbed and repackaged it. Dennis's estranged brother, Bryan Yamato, a scientist with a project involving black holes, serves as a foil: his work is abstract and cosmic, while Dennis's is visceral and commercial, yet both are ways of managing the unmanageable.## Death as Entertainment {#death-as-entertainment}The commodification of death takes a darker turn in Chapter 2, City of Laughter, where a struggling stand-up comedian takes a job at a euthanasia park built on the site of a former prison. The park uses roller coasters to end the lives of infected children, and the narrator's job is to entertain them—to make dying children laugh as they ride toward their deaths. The juxtaposition of childhood joy and state-sanctioned killing is the novel's most brutal image of death as a managed, marketable experience.The park is not a hospital or a hospice; it is an amusement park, complete with costumed entertainers and carefully choreographed final moments. The narrator helps place nearly 150 children on the Osiris coaster over two months. The name Osiris—the Egyptian god of the afterlife—signals the park's attempt to wrap death in mythology, to make it feel meaningful and even sacred. But the sacred is inseparable from the commercial: the park is a business, the children are customers, and their deaths are the product.What makes this chapter so unsettling is the narrator's complicity. He is not a villain; he is a failed comedian who needs the work. He develops genuine relationships with the children and their families, especially Dorrie and her son Fitch. When Fitch's condition deteriorates, the narrator arranges a special day for him at the park and ultimately operates the Osiris ride himself for Fitch's final ride. The scene is both tender and horrifying: the narrator's love for Fitch is real, but it is expressed through the machinery of the death park. The novel refuses to let us separate the genuine emotion from the commercial apparatus that contains it.## The New Death Companies {#the-new-death-companies}By Chapter 12, Before You Melt Into the Sea, the plague has receded but left behind a landscape of chronic illness and a thriving industry of new death companies. The narrator runs Eden Ice, a company that provides artistic alternatives to burial and cremation—in this case, resomation, dissolving the body in a solution of water and potassium hydroxide at 350 degrees. The narrator's client, a tattooed woman dying of plague-related brain cancer, wants her body turned into an ice sculpture of a schooner, with her tattoos preserved and framed by a separate company called Immortal Ink LLC.The chapter is narrated as a second-person address to the deceased client, and it is one of the most intimate passages in the novel. The narrator has researched jazz to impress her, learned about the Miminashi Hoichi tale, and redesigned the sculpture to transform her into a kirin, a dragon-deer hybrid. Leaving the world should be mythic, the client writes, and the narrator takes this seriously.But the intimacy exists within a commercial frame. The narrator cites the company's A-plus Better Business Bureau rating and its gold coffin award for Most Promising Funerary Start-Up of 2040 from FEEL: Funerary Enterprises, Entrepreneurs, and Lobbyists. The acronym FEEL is a dark joke: the industry has organized itself into a lobbying group with a name that sounds like an emotion. The chapter shows that even the most personalized, artisanal death services are still products, marketed and rated and awarded. The client's tattoos are her stories, but they are also inventory to be processed by a subcontractor.## The Afterlife of Data {#the-afterlife-of-data}The commodification of death extends beyond the physical body in Chapter 10, The Used-to-Be Party. Dan, a survivor who wakes from a coma to find his wife and daughter dead, takes a job at WeFuture (formerly BitPalPrime, a social media platform acquired by the funerary banks). His work involves approving memorial profile requests and answering messages for the deceased. His floor supervisor, Dennis—the same Dennis from the elegy hotels—manages shadow profiles, employees who impersonate the dead, continuing to post updates and chat with friends and family.This is the logical endpoint of the commodification of death: the dead themselves become content, managed by workers who perform their personalities. The shadow profiles are a service, sold to grieving families who cannot let go. But they also raise unsettling questions about authenticity and consent. The dead cannot consent to being impersonated, and the living cannot distinguish between the real person and the simulation. The novel does not resolve this tension; it simply presents it as the next stage of the death industry.Dan's own experience complicates the picture. He takes pride in his work, helping people through their pain. He is not a villain; he is a grieving man who has found a way to be useful. The chapter's title, The Used-to-Be Party, refers to a block party Dan organizes for his surviving neighbors, but it also describes the dead themselves—people who used to be, now reduced to profiles and ashes and memories.## Complexity and Contradiction {#complexity-and-contradiction}The novel's treatment of the commodification of death is not a simple condemnation. Nagamatsu repeatedly shows that the commercial death industry fills a vacuum left by the collapse of communal and state support. The elegy hotels are exploitative, but they are also the only place where families can grieve beside their dead. The euthanasia park is horrifying, but it is also the only place where dying children receive care and attention. The shadow profiles are deceptive, but they are also a form of continued connection.Val's defense of her work—that clients have a basic right to process their grief with our help—is not entirely wrong. The problem is not that grief is being commodified; it is that grief has been abandoned by every other institution. The novel's critique is aimed less at the death industry itself than at the society that made it necessary. When Dennis reflects that once upon a time this was how we dealt with death, he is not romanticizing the past; he is noting that the rituals of mourning have been outsourced to the market.The Elegy Hotel functions as the novel's central symbol of this dynamic: a space that is simultaneously a hotel, a funeral home, and a business, where the dead are guests and the bereaved are customers. The void, by contrast, represents the space where commodification fails—the dark, formless afterlife where plague victims gather without services, products, or transactions, stripped of everything except their stories and their shared humanity. And the Starship Yamato, the novel's other major plot thread, offers a contrasting vision: a collective project that carries the dead and the living toward an uncertain future, not as a commodity but as a community.## Study Questions {#study-questions}**1. How does the elegy hotel system transform the relationship between the living and the dead?**The elegy hotels turn the dead into guests and the bereaved into customers. The three-part preservation process—sterilization, embalming, and plasticizing—is designed not to honor the dead but to extend the commercial relationship, buying families time to say goodbye while the crematoriums catch up. The dead become inventory, processed and stored, while the living rent space beside them. The novel suggests that this transformation is not merely economic but emotional: grief itself is packaged into a service with payment plans and marketing slogans.**2. What does the contrast between Mr. Leung's underground funerals and the elegy hotels reveal about the novel's critique?**Mr. Leung's services are the novel's counterpoint to the commercial death industry. Families pay what they can—sometimes in food, sometimes in funerary tokens—and the rituals are traditional: incense, photographs, communal crying. Dennis reflects that once upon a time this was how we dealt with death, suggesting that the commercial system has displaced a more communal approach. But the novel does not idealize Mr. Leung's operation; it is underground precisely because the official system has made it unnecessary or illegal. The contrast reveals that the commodification of death is not inevitable but the result of specific economic and political choices.**3. How do funerary tokens function as a symbol in the novel?**Funerary tokens are a cryptocurrency specifically for death-related transactions, and they symbolize the complete absorption of death into the market economy. The billboard slogan SPEND YOUR FUNERARY TOKENS ON THE LIVING captures the absurdity of the system: death has its own currency, and even the living are encouraged to participate in the economy of loss. Dennis's meager holdings—fifty funerary inc tokens and a fraction of a Bitcoin—show that even the workers in the death industry are marginal participants in the economy they serve.**4. In what ways does the Used-to-Be Party chapter show commodification extending beyond physical death?**The chapter introduces WeFuture's shadow profiles, where employees impersonate the dead, continuing to post updates and chat with friends and family. This extends commodification from the body to the identity itself: the dead become content, managed by workers who perform their personalities. Dan's job approving memorial profiles and answering messages for the deceased shows that even the afterlife is now a service industry. The chapter suggests that when death is fully commodified, the boundary between the living and the dead becomes a matter of customer service.**5. Does the novel ultimately condemn or accept the commercialization of death? What evidence supports each reading?**The novel does both, and the tension is deliberate. The critique is evident in the elegy hotels' marketing campaigns, the euthanasia park's choreographed deaths, and the absurdity of FEEL's gold coffin award. But the novel also shows that these services meet real needs: Val's defense of her work, the Eden Ice narrator's genuine care for his client, and Dan's pride in helping people through their pain. The book's position seems to be that the commodification of death is a symptom of a deeper failure—the abandonment of communal mourning—and that the market fills the vacuum not because it is good but because nothing else does. The novel leaves readers to decide whether that is a tragedy, a necessity, or both.```