In the Land of Long Fingernails is Charles Wilkins’s newest memoir, recounting the surreal summer of 1969 when he worked as a gravedigger at an expansive Toronto cemetery. A poor university student at the time, 19-year-old Wilkins took the job out of desperation after being rejected by finer establishments like Dick’s Nifty Car Wash. Wilkins describes his summer at Willowlawn with grisly amusement and a fascination for the oddities of his job: “While a part of me loathed the cemetery, another part revelled in its every bizarre nuance and hypocrisy.”

Wilkins finds himself under the direction of an aging, alcoholic foreman named Scotty — a veteran in the business of corpse disposal — whose ethics are only slightly less appalling than those of the office-bound corporate drones who run the place. Although we habitually bear witness to gruesome and deplorable practices, the job itself is not hard. There is plenty of time to laze under the ornamental willows or share a joint in the Garden of the Immaculate Conception with the oddball assortment of summer staff.

The book is strung together by its characters as much as by individual events, and Wilkins breathes such life into every member of his graveyard cast that we grow to know them almost as well as he does. There’s Peter the Dutch digger, hired a decade ago to replace Scotty and still dolefully awaiting the old man’s exit. There’s Norman, the teenaged air guitarist and Fred the one-armed Polish gardener. There is Luccio the big Italian, a PhD candidate whom Wilkins befriends quickly and looks up to as an unlikely mentor. Luccio spends his workdays reading Joyce, waxing poetic and waiting for his great gig in the corporate world to materialize so he can leave the cemetery for the lesser of two evils. As their friendship grows, so, too, does the reader’s attachment to Luccio.

In the Land of Long Fingernails is dark but never sombre, funny but absorbing. Wilkins relishes in his writing; his prose is rollicking, his sentences are long, sprawling and bubbling over with imagery and humour. He disperses the archetypal mists that hang over cemeteries, for Willowlawn is no eerie, unearthly graveyard with ghosts squatting behind the tombstones. It is a conglomeration of manicured lawns, sinking graves, botched burials and questionable practices. Seen through Wilkins’s sharp, playful gaze, the business of working with stiffs is anything but.