Today’s media often lets the audience experience the haunting allure of graveyards. With Halloween approaching, the veil between the living and the dead will be that much thinner.

This time, author Richard Bak invites readers to experience the heart and soul of the crypt.

In his nonfiction work, “Boneyards: Detroit Under Ground,” Bak explores some of Detroit’s most well-known cemeteries, from the serene and beautiful to the most grotesque.

It is less of a novel and more of a showcase. After a brief history of funeral rites in prehistoric eras and the following centuries, the book gives readers a guided, reflective tour through Detroit’s graveyards with photographs of tombstones and caskets, along with some testimony about them from the past and present.

The featured pieces vary as well. Bak shows cemeteries as peaceful parks, where stone angels watch over families on a Sunday picnic. He also features cemeteries that have been left to their own devices, growing into the landscape.

The infamous gangster and drug dealer of the 1980s, Maserati Rick, is shown buried in style. The famous memorial house once occupied by former President Ulysses S. Grant is pages away from a makeshift shrine of stuffed animals, flowers and candles dedicated to a gunned-down drug addict.

Both the constructive and destructive impulses of the city have laid the dead in their graves, and their tombs continue to stand steadfast amidst the waves of history’s ebb and flow.

A survey of Detroit’s history would not be complete without the culture that Detroit’s graveyards preserve for all to appreciate and admire. This work highlights the mournful spirit of Detroit throughout the years.

The photographs are works of art in their own right, revering the dead through light, depth and shadow. The pictures capture how the buried deceased, or just the beauty of their graves, impacted those left behind, including the author. “Boneyards” will certainly allow readers to see how Detroiters have celebrated life through the dignity of death.