Rotters (Unabridged)
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Angel Down, Whalefall, The Shape of Water with Guillermo del Toro, Scowler, and more, comes Rotters.
Grave-robbing. What kind of monster would do such a thing? It's true that Leonardo da Vinci did it, Shakespeare wrote about it, and the resurrection men of nineteenth-century Scotland practically made it an art. But none of this matters to Joey Crouch, a sixteen-year-old straight-A student living in Chicago with his single mom. For the most part, Joey's life is about playing the trumpet and avoiding the daily humiliations of high school.
Everything changes when Joey's mother dies in a tragic accident and he is sent to rural Iowa to live with the father he has never known, a strange, solitary man with unimaginable secrets. At first, Joey's father wants nothing to do with him, but once father and son come to terms with each other, Joey's life takes a turn both macabre and exhilarating.
Daniel Kraus's masterful plotting and unforgettable characters make Rotters a moving, terrifying, and unconventional epic about fathers and sons, complex family ties, taboos, and the ever-present specter of mortality.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Following in his father’s footsteps leads a teenager to strange, disturbing places in this thoroughly original YA horror story. Joey Crouch is just a quiet 16-year-old kid from Chicago who mostly keeps to himself—until his mother suddenly dies, forcing him to move to Iowa and live with the father he’s never met. And his dad is odd. His weird smell and late hours are bad enough before Joey learns the reason behind them: Dad makes his living as a grave robber, looting the coffins of the recently deceased…and Joey’s about to become his apprentice. Daniel Kraus seamlessly blends gruesome imagery with normal teenage anxieties, cleverly crafting a powerful atmosphere that’s relentlessly cringeworthy from every angle. Narrator Kirby Heyborne does an excellent job of capturing Joey’s fear, uncertainty, and abject horror as each new creepy detail is revealed. Wildly imaginative but still grounded all too firmly in reality, this scary story isn’t quite like anything we’ve heard before.
