99 Ways to Die (and How to Avoid Them): A Darkly Funny Audiobook Review

Read time: 5 minutes

🎧 Listened in audio 📢 Narrated by Natalie Naudus ⏱ Duration: 14 hours
Genre: Non Fiction 🏷️ Publisher: Macmillan Audio and St. Martin’s Press

Book Blurb:

Dr. Ashley Alker, a self-described death-escapologist (emergency medicine doctor, in plainer terms), has seen it all, from flesh-eating bacteria to a serial killer’s handiwork to the more mundane but no less deadly stuff. 99 Ways to Die and How to Avoid Them is her illuminating, darkly funny guide to 99 of the most terrifying ways to go, and how to dodge them. Each chapter pairs patient stories with her own life and medical experience, moving through sex, poison, drugs, biological warfare, disease, animals, crime, the elements, and more. Think an Anthony Bourdain-style tour of death, entertaining as much as it informs, for anyone who’s read The Vagina Bible, Stiff, What If?, or How Not to Die.

Let’s talk about the book:

I started listening to this book because… how do you not get pulled in by a title like that? It’s bound to create curiosity even in the least curious of people, and I am very nosy when it comes to books. There’s also some inference about serial killers toward the end, as the blurb promises. So, I was roped in, hook line and sinker.

Written by an emergency room doctor, the examples and narratives are real time (naturally, this being non fiction), and hilarious. Ashley Alker brings levity to a morbid topic, which makes listening to the content fun. Right from simple things like flu and the common cold, to poisons and deadly sea creatures, the stories are innumerable, enlightening, and engaging to listen to.

Ashley has seen the weirdest of weird maladies, and she has no qualms describing them to us in her uncannily humorful way, making the gross medical details rather fun to take in. There are also plenty of references to House M.D. (yes, the one with Hugh Laurie, the new Dumbledore in Audible audiobooks), which made it even more fun for me since I recently binged the entire series for the second time, enjoying every bit of it. Now you understand why I got attracted to this book.

The only thing to keep in mind is that some areas get slightly technical, and the mind glazes over for the non-medical folks among us. I skipped over those parts, with sincere apologies to the author. I’m here just for the fun of it, and if I learn something along the way, even better, but I’m not here for the actual degree (shrugs).

I’d recommend this book to anyone who loves medical dramas like House M.D. and Grey’s Anatomy. This one is more relevant though, being written by an actual doctor and not Shonda Rhimes.

Would I recommend it?

Yes, without hesitation, especially if you’re the kind of reader who ends up mid-medical-drama-binge more often than not. Dr. Alker takes a topic that should be grim and somehow makes it a genuinely fun listen, patient stories and all. It’s not a book you need to absorb cover to cover either. Skip the technical bits that don’t land for you and you’ll still walk away entertained. Natalie Naudus’s narration keeps the pace lively too. A little morbid, a lot of fun, and worth the 14 hours.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

If You Liked This, Try These Next

• Stiff by Mary Roach — If the gross-but-fascinating medical trivia was your favorite part, Mary Roach basically wrote the blueprint for this genre, this time focused on what happens to the human body after death.

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay — Another medical professional turning brutal shifts into something wickedly funny, this one from a former junior doctor in the UK’s NHS. Same dark humor, different hospital ward.

Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org | Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | Booktrovert | OpenLibrary | Litsy

• Working Stiff by Judy Melinek and T.J. Mitchell — A New York City medical examiner’s memoir, packed with the same real-patient-story structure and a similar gallows sense of humor about mortality.

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• What If? by Randall Munroe — For the reader who liked being scared and informed in equal measure. Munroe answers absurd hypothetical questions with real science, and some of the answers are just as deadly as anything in Dr. Alker’s book.

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• How Not to Die by Michael Greger — Mentioned right in the Goodreads blurb as a comp title, and it makes sense. Where Dr. Alker covers the dramatic ways you could go, Greger covers the everyday, mostly food-related ways you might be shortening your life without realizing it.

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What’s the deadliest thing you’ve ever survived?

Poison ivy, a bee sting gone wrong, that one flu that felt like the end of days? Drop it in the comments. I’m collecting stories the way Dr. Alker collects chapters.

Book Links:

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