Rotters
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- $7.99
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. Wildly imaginative but still grounded all too firmly in reality, this scary story isn’t quite like anything we’ve heard before.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kraus's (The Monster Variations) sophomore novel is a gruesome and meandering work that saps the life (so to speak) out of a potentially fascinating subject. When 16-year-old Joey's mother is killed by a bus, he's sent to live with Ken Harnett, his previously unknown father in Iowa. Harnett is distant and passively abusive, not taking care of his son's food or hygiene needs for days at a time as he travels, and Joey quickly becomes the target of school bullies (including both a jock and a teacher). When Joey discovers that Harnett's business is actually grave robbing, he persuades his father to bring him along. There's little sense of conflict over the morality or ethics of grave robbing, which is matched by Joey's lack of remorse over his revenge on the bullies or those he perceives as having harmed him something that might be interesting in a character deliberately portrayed as a sociopath, but here feels like an omission. There's little danger or excitement in the grave robbing scenes and nothing new in the dreary, overlong scenes of an outsider at a new school. Ages 14 up.
