Following last year’s Fever House, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author Keith Rosson is back with The Devil by Name, the much-anticipated sequel to the apocolyptic horror novel – and we’re very excited to bring you an exclusive excerpt today, courtesy of Penguin Random House.
Hitting shelves tomorrow on September 10, The Devil by Name has been described as a “high-octane, face-melting, rock-and-roll ride into a world gone mad”, gathering praise from fellow bestselling genre authors including Chuck Wendig, Nat Cassidy, CJ Leede, Joe Hill, oh, and the one and only Stephen King:
“Fever House and The Devil by Name are exciting, suspenseful, horrifying, and written at a flurry-of-punches pace. Read them now and you can thank me later.”
If high praise from the King of horror literature himself doesn’t convince you, this plot synopsis certainly will.
In The Devil by Name:
Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”—once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.
In Portland, where it all began, guilt-ridden detective John Bonner scours the city’s darkest corners for clues to humanity’s redemption. In New England, Katherine Moriarty mourns the devastating losses of her husband and son while in hiding from Terradyne. And across the ocean in France, a sixteen-year-old girl named Naomi Laurent discovers she has a disturbing and powerful gift—which may just be the key to the world’s salvation.
Equal parts gruesome and beautiful, The Devil by Name is a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival. As its characters’ paths inevitably collide across the ravaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, they are united by the desire to not just escape death but to carve out some way to live anew.
Everything starts and ends in the fever house.
The audiobook edition of The Devil By Name is written by award-winning narrator Xe Sands. The rockin’ cover art (seen above) was once again handled (get it) by designer Ella Laytham.