These Rotters

An old man has to protect his sick wife and make ends meet during a zombie outbreak. This short story won the first place in a Greece-wide contest by i-write publications.

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.

Two years later, the trains no longer carry survivors from Baltimore City. But it’s far from empty. Desperate to move on, Shelby questions how far she’s come since being freed. When an unexpected visitor delivers her lost map with clues from an old friend, she realizes it could be the key to unlocking the virus's origin. Shelby must face the infected again to uncover the truth behind the outbreak. As the only surviving sour with extraordinary abilities, Dean prefers isolation. He avoids interacting with the self-made hospital staff, but still agrees to round up rotters to be cured. When VioTech returns during accelerated efforts to clean out the city, Dean discovers special forces are targeting him. Unable to escape on his own, Dean is running out of options. Unlock the truth behind the virus in this exciting conclusion to the Lazarus City series.

Birmingham, England, c. 1973: industrial strikes, bad pop music, corrosive class warfare, adolescent angst, IRA bombings. Four friends: a class clown who stoops very low for a laugh; a confused artist enthralled by guitar rock; an earnest radical with socialist leanings; and a quiet dreamer obsessed with poetry, God, and the prettiest girl in school. As the world appears to self-destruct around them, they hold together to navigate the choppy waters of a decidedly ambiguous decade.

The characters of The Rotters’ Club–Jonathan Coe’s beloved novel of adolescent life in the 1970s–have bartered their innocence for the vengeance of middle age in this incisive portrait of Cool Britannia at the millennium.

Felix Allsey is a travel writer with a keen eye for the paranormal, and he’s carved out a unique, if only slightly lucrative, niche for himself in nonfiction; he writes travelogues of the country’s most haunted places, after haunting them himself. When he convinces the owner of the infamous Rotterdam Mansion to let him stay on the premises for 13 nights, he believes he’s finally found the location that will bring him a bestseller. As with his other gigs, he sets rules for himself: no leaving the house for any reason, refrain from outside contact, and sleep during the day. When Thomas Ruth, Felix's oldest friend and fellow horror film obsessive, joins him on the project, the two dance around a recent and unspeakably painful rough-patch in their friendship, but eventually fall into their old rhythms of dark humor and movie trivia. That’s when things start going wrong: screams from upstairs, figures in the thresholds, and more than what should be in any basement. Felix realizes the book he’s writing, and his very state of mind, is tilting from nonfiction into all out horror, and the shocking climax answers a question that’s been staring these men in the face all along: In Rotter House, who’s haunting who?

It is 1917. The Great War, the War To End All Wars, has raged across the globe for three long years. The Russians are ready to sue for peace and the French and British are exhausted. Germany and Austria-Hungary are close to winning as they look west. But across the Atlantic, Woodrow Wilson is planning on declaring war. And a million fresh American troops will tip the balance in the Allies favor.In New Mexico, former President Theodore Roosevelt is training his Rough Rider Volunteer regiments in the desert, hoping to be sent to war. But he is not the hero he once was. Ernest Hemingway is on his first job, an assignment as a reporter for the Kansas City Star. He has come to New Mexico to investigate an abandoned mining town.Together, they discover there is an evil rising in the Mexican desert. Towns and Native-American tribes are vanishing. The dead are being reborn. Teddy Roosevelt is going to ride into battle one last time and Ernest Hemingway is embarked on his first great adventure against an ancient and powerful enemy.

On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.