Bent Heavens
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“Kraus gets under your skin with brutal, elegant efficiency. Necessarily horrifying, devastatingly timely.”—Kiersten White, New York Times-bestselling author of The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein and Slayer
From New York Times-bestselling author Daniel Kraus comes a breakneck, genre-defying YA thriller perfect for fans of Kiersten White, Neal Shusterman, and M. T. Anderson.
Liv Fleming’s father went missing more than two years ago, not long after he claimed to have been abducted by aliens. Liv has long accepted that he’s dead, though that doesn’t mean she has given up their traditions. Every Sunday, she and her lifelong friend Doug Monk trudge through the woods to check the traps Lee left behind, traps he set to catch the aliens he so desperately believed were after him.
But Liv is done with childhood fantasies. Done pretending she believes her father’s absurd theories. Done going through the motions for Doug’s sake. However, on the very day she chooses to destroy the traps, she discovers in one of them a creature so inhuman it can only be one thing. In that moment, she’s faced with a painful realization: her dad was telling the truth. And no one believed him.
Now, she and Doug have a choice to make. They can turn the alien over to the authorities…or they can take matters into their own hands.
On the heels of the worldwide success of The Shape of Water, Daniel Kraus returns with a horrifying and heartbreaking thriller about the lengths people go to find justice and the painful reality of grief.
“Bent Heavens is the darkest, angriest alien horror story that I've ever encountered. Hell. Yes.”—Stephanie Perkins, New York Times-bestselling author of There's Someone Inside Your House
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Almost three years before this novel's start, high school senior Liv Fleming's father, Lee, a beloved high school English teacher, disappeared for four days. Eight months after he reappeared, naked and staggering in the town square of Bloughton, Iowa, he vanished again, for good. In the feverish days following his initial reappearance, Lee obsessively crafted a shed full of weapons and built a series of traps in the woods designed to catch the aliens that he claimed had abducted and experimented on him. When one of the traps ensnares a humanoid being, Liv and her childhood friend, outcast Doug Monk, restrain it in the shed for interrogation. But Doug, who loved Lee like a father, spirals out of control, convinced that cruelty is the only route to finding out what happened. Struggling to conceal this explosive secret amid her senior year and a burgeoning romance, Liv must decide whether she's willing to sacrifice her humanity in the same way, and the road to the truth is pitted with one uncomfortable twist after another. Kraus's blend of sci-fi and heart-stopping horror isn't for the squeamish, but it offers a viscerally terrifying examination of grief, othering, and the price of vengeance. Ages 14 up.)
