As recently as the 1970s, most newspaper obituaries were meager, dry affairs—if people hadn't managed to become famous during their lives, they left the earth with nothing more than a brief report including the date of death, any survivors, and when and where the funeral would be held. Writing obituaries was decidedly uncreative work; in fact, most journalists would rather have died than write them. And the only fun in reading obituaries involved doing the math to figure out the age of the deceased or the morbid possibilities that lay within the stock obit phrases "died suddenly" or "died after a long illness."

But today's obituaries are written with distinct style—from reverential to caustic—and read with relish by enough obit fans to necessitate an array of websites and the Annual Obituary Writers Conference. As Marilyn Johnson points out in The Dead Beat, her lighthearted, insightful, and fact-packed ode to obituaries and those who write them, the obituary is now an art form. Each "tight little coil of biography with its literary flourishes reminds us of a poem," writes Johnson, whose reportage is just as moving and compelling as the contemporary obituarists she lauds. "Certainly it contains the most creative writing in journalism."

Johnson became "addicted to obituaries" in 1986 after reading two side-by-side obits in the New York Times for the scientist who isolated vitamin C and the scientist who isolated vitamin K, who had died a day apart. That "magical" coincidence was not an isolated incident. As Johnson notes, with humor and infectious enthusiasm, "people have been slipping out of this world in occupational clusters" for ages. To wit: Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox and Watergate counsel Samuel Dash died on the same day, and, as Johnson puts it, "Lawrence Welk's trumpeter and his accordion player played a duet out the door."

The modern obituary is a lively, vivid, detailed portrait, whether its subject is a celebrity or average person who would ironically remain a nobody if not for the newspaper tribute to his or her passing. This contemporary format was pioneered in the early 1980s by reporter Jim Nicholson, whose New Journalism-style obits for the Philadelphia Daily News were like hard nuggets of glittery and gritty details about lives that, in Johnson's phrase, "had been considered dull as linoleum to the general public." Nicholson presented average Joes as "heroes of their neighborhood and characters of consequence." He elicited amazing quotes ("I had unfortunately burned up my cat Smokey in the dryer," began one obit. "Lou gave me a book, 1001 Uses for a Dead Cat. You loved him and at the same time you wanted to strangle him"). He also peppered each story with wry comments: "They were married three months later and not because they had to"; "Charlie did it all with one eye"; and "He had the digestive juices of a shark."

Add a few key historical events—like Rock Hudson being revealed as an AIDS casualty in his 1985 obituary (the first obit Johnson clipped), and 9/11, followed by the New York Times' Pulitzer Prize-winning "Portraits of Grief"—and the obituary was revived, creating the opportunity for newspapers to tell the truth about, say, Opal Petty spending 20 years in an insane asylum because her parents didn't like her dancing, or gas station proprietor Billy Carter being a thorn in his presidential brother's side. In The Dead Beat, Johnson makes pilgrimages to today's great obit writers and editors—a wild and whimsical bunch—on both sides of the Atlantic, traces the obituary's history, chats with members of the growing cult of obituary enthusiasts, and parses out the obituary form. As she discovers, it's not only a great time to die, but a fascinating time to be alive.

Magazine writer and editor Marilyn Johnson has written obituaries for Princess Diana, Jacqueline Onassis, Katharine Hepburn, Johnny Cash, Bob Hope, and Marlon Brando. She makes her home in Briarcliff.

What could be dangerous about a writers' retreat at a fashionable upstate estate? The logical presumption would be that the only damage might be to one's pride. At first, readers of The Ghost Orchid might be lulled into thinking that's all Ellis Brooks is risking at Bosco, a historic estate near Great Sacandaga Lake, where she jumps into the mix with greats and near-greats of assorted genres and various attitudes to create and sip Scotch for an evening.

But they'd be kidding themselves. In the company of a famous novelist, a half-mad poet, a landscape architect, and a Serious Biographer, Ellis is about to face up to a million things—both seen and unseen.

This is definitely a horror story, but it's the quiet horror of poison and suffocation, the endless deep night at the bottom of a well. The book dances deftly between the story Ellis has come to tell—about a series of séances at Bosco gone horribly wrong—and the energies stirred by her presence there now, making Bosco once again the unseemly site of violence and terror.

And, yes, somebody does allude to the popular chocolate drink early on. Instead of thinking the retreat has a silly name, you'll end up feeling slightly spooked by the chocolate syrup. Ellis's mother, you see, was a medium. The book she has come to write is about the last medium who visited there, Corinth Blackwell, a young woman who traveled a hard road all her own—and found herself in the midst of an equally quirky and treacherous group of creative souls.

Besides the chocolate syrup, you may never look at literary types and their hangers-on the same way again either. The true spookiness of this book lies in how ordinarily extraordinary is the façade covering up the mayhem. Half the time you wish these people, even Ellis, would just get over themselves; the other half, you're cringing, because their probable fate is so very much worse and weirder than what they deserve.

Throughout, there are thoughtful meditations on the state of men, women, children, marriage, mothering, and morality. A walk through some Hudson Valley history, used as a backdrop for a dark dream of treachery. A musing on how the more things seem to change in this all-too-human race, the more they remain the same. The tables tilt and the snow falls and the egos lock horns, and the isolated locale becomes the kind of rarified atmosphere in which orchids thrive and prosper.

The Ghost Orchid, being no ordinary blossom, drifts on this deep current with deceptive simplicity, spiraling down into a maelstrom that will make Stephen King fans remember what they missed about Henry James. Goodman casually tosses the noose around the reader's neck, then tightens it while you're not looking—with plaintive children and innocent cups of tea—until you can scarcely breathe.

Ellis is delightful—brave, unwillingly psychic, yet charmingly and alarmingly mortal. You keep wanting to tell her not to go down that moldy staircase, not to open that locked door. Meanwhile, you begin to realize that, for Ellis, there is no other option.

What gives this book such power in its spookiness is that believability. If spirits were to speak, it might be in some of these ways and for some of these reasons. The Ghost Orchid will delight anybody who remembers loving a good ghost story and then tiring of the genre's clichés. It's fresh and fragrant.

With mayhem and family dysfunction part of the mainstream menu, a fresh take becomes quite a challenge. Goodman, who won the 2004 Dashiell Hammett Prize for The Seduction of Water, meets it deftly with this tale, told in hushed, silken language and likely to rattle around in your synapses, setting off all sorts of vibrations.

After savoring every "eroto-hypnotic flicker of fireflies" and "riverbank cloaked in wet chokecherry" and "rain-soused morning misting down from Muckish" in Eamon Grennan's latest collection, I can state with confidence that he is beloved of St. Colomba, patron saint of Ireland and poets. Make that doubly beloved, because the saint is named for a dove, and Grennan's ravishing language does honor to, among a teeming of other creatures, a fiercely fragile aviary of birds, including loons, blackbirds, waxwings, robins, chickadees, finches, swallows, starlings, geese, ducks, and a "clackering magpie." Indeed, the preternaturally glorious photograph on the book's cover might well represent the very wings that Grennan keeps tucked beneath his greatcoat, the wings most poets wish they had.

To venture one last ornithological analogy, Grennan has a raptorial intelligence, one upon which nothing that scurries, bolts, or skitters through the natural or inner landscape is lost. His eye and ear go darting after details, distilling them into a language whose brisk, bright tempos perfectly mirror "the quick of it," the myriad simultaneities of life as it happens:

Beneath the ice-clamp of Casperkill Creek you saw clear water
Run into its own life against the odds, making (the way things
Will) a fresh start—just as a raucous, high-minded, truth-telling
Matter-of-fact congregation of crows comes tumbling.

Compared to Grennan, your run-of-the-monastery Zen master is guilty of inattention. In The Quick of It, his alertness never flags; he responds with a reverent generosity to the manifold things of the world and their moment-to-moment collisions with the senses. What he writes of the 18th-century genre painter Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin could be said of the poet himself: "He may have been attending to the way live nature stays / At the given edge of everything, a real presence even in these / Absolute indoors of the eye."

To excerpt from the poems is not to do them justice. Untitled, one to a page, they each consist of 10 lines in various configurations (3-3-3-1, 4-4-2, etc.) and, as they mostly tend to rush along as irresistibly as the light, water, birdsong, weather, and other phenomena that they catch and translate into the music of vowels and consonants, they are each best experienced all of a piece. It is tempting, however, to share a few shimmers from the flux— "the whole flock closing / Like a broken concertina into leaves where they become invisible," for instance, or the "sea's white mane riding its buckle-crown of green / And turning to a fleecy nothing," or a blackbird's "incendiary yellow-ringed eye running rings out to the rings of Saturn."

If I had to winnow one favorite from the fold, it would be the poem beginning with Grennan's apprehension of "the quick ripple of a groundhog's back" as it dashes under a hedge. Although the creature seems to have "melted into nature's mouth," Grennan senses it abiding in its hideaway, "at ease in the sphere of its own immediate knowings..." Then, lightning strikes—in his mind's eye the poet discerns a sudden correspondence between the groundhog vanishing into its hole and Shakespeare vanishing into his language, "quill-end tipping his tongue / As he takes a breath and disappears into the leaves and lavish music of another / Turbulent little word-shiver for a minute, and he is all alone there, listening."

Born in Dublin, Eamon Grennan lives in Poughkeepsie and teaches at Vassar College, where he holds the Dexter M. Ferry Jr. Chair in the English Department. He spends a good part of each year in the western reaches of Ireland, where, it is tonic to imagine, he and St. Columba occasionally hold forth on the "dust-fine deliquescence of damp the falling rain is" over a pint in a Drumcliffe pub.