Over a span of almost 60 years, E. Hoffmann Price, a prolific writer during the great pulp magazine fiction era, befriended many of the great and near-great colleagues of the profession—writers like H. P, Lovecraft, August Derleth, Jack Williamson, Edmond Hamilton, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Henry Kuttner, Seabury Quinn, Otis Adelbert Kline, W. K. Mashburn, Ralph Milne Farley, Robert Spencer Carr, Albert Richard Wetjen, Norbert C. Davis, Harry Olmstead, Milo Ray Phelps— and Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright.

Through a vast correspondence, diaries he kept of his many cross-country motor trips, E. Hoffmann Price encapsulates the successes and failures of a score of fascinating lives through a series of engaging biographical essays that also reveal important details about the author's own nomadic life.

Historian Richard Bleiler says, "I was absolutely floored by BOOK OF THE DEAD. It is incredible! Price was one of the undisputed masters of the biographical sketch. His works on Smith, Lovecraft and Howard are among the most informative and vital portraits of these people ever done—and now there is a whole book of his portraits of other pulp writers and figures, all vividly portrayed, warts and all."

Bleiler continues, "This is one of the most important documents in pulp studies to emerge in recent years, and I thoroughly regret that it was not published 25 years ago when Price was still alive to get honored for it."

BOOK OF THE DEAD includes additional essays by and about Price, a bibliography of his fiction, an index, and a photo gallery.