Katzenjammer

Cat has spent her life inside her high school, a place that has long supplied everything she could want, and she has never once stepped outside its walls. Now the building is changing. Its corridors tighten and widen in time with the school's breathing, and the bathroom showers spill red water. Readers who enjoyed American Horror Story or the bleak absurdity of Kafka's The Metamorphosis will recognize a similar blend of horror and dark humor here.

Her closest friend is gradually turning into cardboard, and Cat's face has been replaced by a cat-shaped mask made from her own hardened flesh. She cannot recall why she is confined to the school or why many of her classmates, herself included, are transforming in the same way. Escape has always been impossible in this upside-down world, but every student eventually faces a self-destruction of their own. To survive it, Cat must find a way out, and to do that she has to recover the memories of what put her there.

The story alternates between the past and the present as it unfolds, and it turns on family, love, tragedy, and the masks people place on others and on themselves. Francesca Zappia builds a suspenseful, unsettling tale about grief and the power of memory.

Fans of Chelsea Pitcher's This Lie Will Kill You, E. Lockhart's We Were Liars, Marieke Nijkamp's This Is Where It Ends, and Karen McManus's One of Us Is Lying are the readers this novel is aimed at, and they may find themselves as caught up in its treacherous hallways as Cat is in hers.