In 2015, a commissioning editor from the internationally renowned publishers Palgrave Macmillan approached me to suggest dark tourism warranted a subject ‘Handbook’. Consequently,‘dark tourism’as a scholarly field of study had come of age and this Handbook was born. The aim of any academic Handbook is to offer a seminal ‘must-go-to’reference text for a specific subject. The aim of the Palgrave Handbook of Dark Tourism Studiesis no different. During the past 20 years or so, dark tourism research has permutated heritage tourism discourse, thanatology, and memory studies. As a result, the term ‘dark tourism’has been branded into an internationally recognised taxonomy to denote travel to sites of or sites associated with death or ‘difficult heritage’within global visitor economies. Yet, dark tourism is a provocative and contested concept. It divides opinions and emotions both within academic practice and empirical circles. The concept is also often used by sensationalist media to hook readers or viewers with stories of apparent touristic malpractice or dubious ethical visitor behaviour. In essence, dark tourism attempts to capture contemporary (re) presentations of the Significant Other dead within economic paradigms of business supply and consumer demand, as well as highlighting issues of dissonance, politics and historicity, and furthering our sociological understandings of death, the dead and collective memory. Moreover, modern morality is encapsulated through the tourist gaze at mortality at ‘dark sites’. Dark tourism also allows us to commercialise the dead and to retail tragic memories in safe and socially sanctioned tourist environments. Even so, the semi-compulsive nature of consuming dark tourism ensures we do not encounter the actual corpse, but instead mediate specific narratives of the known and unknown dead.