The cover art for the original German edition features the 1926 painting Night Rain on Shinohashi Bridge by the Japanese print artist Hasui Kawase.

[4] American hardcover first editions feature a George Hurrell portrait of Jean Harlow on the cover.

Bookforum writes: "The Dead reads like a reboot of J. G. Ballard’s Crash, in a treatment by Wes Anderson, after a weekend spent binge-watching John Schlesinger’s version of The Day of the Locust.

The result draws out a comically bleak but shakily ambiguous vision of the coming image-world of fascist politics and Tinseltown productions, and of how both authorized a new power of the screen in startlingly effective ways.

", while the Los Angeles Review of Books writes: "Across [The Dead], Kracht leaves clues and tracks (perhaps traps) for the readers to connect (or tumble into), eschewing certainty through deliciously stimulating ambiguity in a remarkable, elegiac, sensual, often grotesque and hilarious novel."