A.B. Funkhauser is a funeral director, classic car junkie and wildlife enthusiast living in Ontario, Canada. Like most funeral directors, she is governed by a strong sense of altruism fueled by the belief that life chooses us.

 

“Were it not for the calling, I would have just as likely remained an office assistant shuffling files around and would have been happy doing so.”

 

Life had another plan. After a long day at the funeral home in the waning months of winter 2010, she looked down the long hall joining the director’s office to the back door leading three steps up and out. At that moment a thought occurred: What if a slightly life-challenged mortician tripped over her man shoes and landed squarely on her posterior, only to learn that someone she once knew and cared about had died and that she was next on the staff roster to care for his remains?

 

Like funeral directing, the writing called, and four years and several drafts later, Heuer Lost and Found was born.

 

What’s a Heuer? Beyond a word rhyming with “lawyer,” Heuer the lawyer is a man conflicted. Complex, layered, and very dead, he counts on the ministrations of the funeral director to set him free.

 

A labor of love and a quintessential muse, Heuer has gone on to inspire several other full- length works and over a dozen short stories.*

 

“To my husband John and my children Adam and Melina, I owe thanks for the encouragement, the support, and the belief that what I was doing was as important as anything I’ve tackled before at work or in art.”

 

Winner of the Preditors & Editors Reader’s Poll for Best Horror 2015, and the New Apple EBook Award 2016 for Horror, Heuer Lost and Found is the first installment in Funkhauser’s Unapologetic Lives series. Her sophomore effort, Scooter Nation, released March 11, 2016. Winner of the New Apple Ebook Award 2016 for Humor, and Winner Best Humor Summer Indie Book Awards 2016, Scooter picks up where Heuer left off, this time with the lens on the funeral home as it falls into the hands of a woeful sybarite.

 

 

A devotee of the gonzo style pioneered by the late Hunter S. Thompson, Funkhauser attempts to shine a light on difficult subjects by aid of humorous storytelling. “In gonzo, characters operate without filters which means they say and do the kinds of things we cannot in an ordered society. Results are often comic but, hopefully, instructive.”

 

SHELL GAME, tapped as a psycho-social cat dramedy with death and laughs, is the third book in the series, and takes aim at a pastoral community with a lot to hide. “With so much of the world currently up for debate, I thought it would be useful to question—again—the motives and machinations championed by the morally flexible, and then let the arbiter be a cat.”

 

Funkhauser is currently working on THE HEUER EFFECT, the prequel to HEUER LOST AND FOUND as well as SELF DEFENSE: A KIRSTI BRUNER MORTUARY MYSTERY.  Her back catalog is currently being reimagined with new covers and layouts. These will be released under her new imprint Out of My Head Publishing. Look for them on Amazon this summer.

 

 

Last Updated: April 11, 2019

 

*The novels: Heuer Lost and Found, Scooter Nation, Shell Game, The Heuer Effect, Poor Undertaker, Dirty Dale, Car Guy, and The May People. The Shorts: The Essential Heuer, Jack Bunny and the Rocket Man, Turd Meets Rock, Cassarine, Terra Nova, Ursa Major, Hey! Birdy, Birdy, The Hagfish Conundrum, Mutual of Omaha, Cheetahs in Flight, Lady Predator, and more…