A zombie movie-obsessed teen is forced to face a dark family secret in
this shocking debut literary novel from a talented new author.
Wow! A crazy, wicked knock-out of a book! -Garth Stein
Fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker attends an all-boys Catholic high school
where roving gangs of bullies make his days a living hell. His mother is
an absentee pillhead, his older brother a self-diagnosed sex-addict, and
his father disappears night after night without explanation. Jeremy
navigates it all with a code cobbled together from the zombie movies
he's obsessed with: Night of the Living Dead, 28 Days Later, Planet
Terror, Zombieland, and Dawn of the Dead among others.
The code is put to the test when he discovers in his father's closet a
bizarre homemade video of a man strapped to a bed, being prepped for
some sort of surgical procedure. As Jeremy attempts to trace the origin
of the video, this remarkable debut moves from its sharp, precocious
beginnings to a climax of almost unthinkable violence, testing him, and
the reader, to the core.