Joey Crouch lives a fairly normal, if sheltered life in Chicago with his mother. However, one morning he wakes up with a feeling of absolute certainty that his mother will die that day. Unfortunately, he turns out to be correct. Soon enough, Joey – who had previously never left Chicago’s city limits – is whisked away to rural Iowa and left in the care of the father he has never met. Joey’s father is mysterious, solitary, and despised (or perhaps feared) by the residents of his small Iowa town.
As Joey tries – and mostly fails – to fit in at a new school, he begins making investigations into his father’s strange habits and secretive activities. He succeeds in unearthing more than information, and is soon caught up in the underground world of grave robbing. Both frightening and exciting, this new turn changes Joey’s life in unimaginable (and certainly illicit) ways: many horrors and betrayals await in the pages of Daniel Kraus’s Rotters.
Rotters is one of the most original novels I have read in a long time; it is incredibly dark and grotesque, but simultaneously engaging and entertaining. Kraus certainly does not skip out on the details, even of horrific scenes of freshly unearthed corpses and the like. The story presents an interesting contrast between the horrors of high school and the clandestine world of grave robbing, as well as their individual effects on Joey as he completes his coming-of-age.
Besides featuring a unique plot and beautiful prose, Rotters manages to be unpredictable but, in hindsight, subtly and skillfully woven together from beginning to end. This may be a book that I have to read twice; I have a feeling that I would love it even more the second time around knowing what all the small details indicate. The story is told from Joey’s point-of-view, but I think it is something that both boys and girls would enjoy; it is certainly not for the faint of heart, though.
- Publisher: Delacorte Press
- Date of Publication: April 5, 2011
