Zombie

A zombie-obsessed teenager has his own way of navigating high school and family dysfunction in this “crazy, wicked, knockout of a book” (Garth Stein, author of The Art of Racing in the Rain).

High school may be hell. But for fourteen-year-old Jeremy Barker, hell doesn’t end when the bell rings. His pill-addicted mother, sex-addicted brother, and mostly-absentee Vietnam-vet father aren’t much of an improvement over the bullies at his all-boys Catholic school. He stays sane by watching movies. Zombie movies, to be exact, that provide a useful code of survival: avoid contact, keep quiet, forget the past, lock-and-load, and fight to survive.

His father’s also a fan, and watching zombie flicks together is their one way of father-son bonding. But even the wildest movie can’t prepare Jeremy for the day his English teacher slips his dad a DVD in the school parking lot—a home DVD of a macabre, ritual surgery. Jeremy’s father won’t say why he has the movie, or whether the gruesome spectacle is real. When his father disappears from the house yet again, Jeremy decides to investigate.

Twisted, fast-paced, and hilarious, this coming-of-age novel is a brand-new take on growing up in a world full of people who don’t understand you—whether those people are your ninth-grade classmates or a horde of slavering zombies.