Rotters, by Daniel Kraus

Joey Crouch's days are fairly monotonous. He's a good student, plays the trumpet, gets along with his Mom, and has a best friend he can count on. His life is not exceptional, living in an apartment in Chicago with his single Mother and having never traveled outside of the city, but it is far from bad.

In an instant, Joey's life takes a completely different turn when his Mother fails to turn to see an oncoming bus and is hit and killed instantly. She would have heard the bus, if she weren't deaf in one ear, the result of an accident that Joey has never pried his Mother about, but he will soon discover the root of this mystery when he is sent to live with his Father in the small town of Bloughton, Iowa.

What follows, is a series of horrible and heart wrenching events that one can hardly imagine having to endure. His Father, Harnett, hardly greets him before he leaves Joey for three days without any food, transportation to school, or idea of where he had gone or when he would return. While waiting for his return, Joey endures extreme bullying from his classmates and teachers and has little hope of escape when a call to his best friend is met with laughs of disbelief before the payphone times out.

When Harnett  finally returns, Joey is determined to find out the reason for his long stints of being away with the intention of turning him into the authorities. What he finds leaves him as pale as death. Harnett digs up the dead and takes the items they were buried with, which requires chopping off appendages and slopping through rot to retrieve the treasure from the bloated bodies.

While Joey is understandably disgusted and in a shock at the discovery of his Father's means of survival, his feelings take a turn as the violence increases at school and it appears his only means of survival is to embrace his Father's penchant for digging up the dead.

From this point on, Kraus concocts a belly-turning assemblage of events and people that will leave the reader reeling. From an underground group of diggers, to a book of polaroids of the dead that is sure to be the end of them all, to Joey helping out the very person that threatened to bring down all of the diggers in a cross-country, drug induced, digging marathon. There is no end of surprises and gut-tumbling descriptions in this handily crafted horror of a book.