Rotters, by Daniel Kraus. Delacorte Press, 2011

This is a coming-of-age book that is light years away from other novels of that genre. This is the darkest story I’ve read in a long time, and I read a lot of dark stuff.

Joey Crouch is 16 and a straight A student being raised by a single mother. He and his best friend, Boris, play jazz trumpet. It’s a comfortable life. His biggest worries are about not wanting to get up in the morning and being pushed to practice his music.

Then his mother dies suddenly. His mother’s will states that Joey is to be placed with his father. The father he knows nothing about, the father who has had no contact with them, the father he had assumed was unfindable. But the father is found in a small town in Iowa. Joey is pre-enrolled in a new high school, told that the town would be idyllic, assured that he’d adjust just fine and that everything was taken care of nice and tidy and he’s put on a bus to Bloughton.

Of course it’s far from idyllic. His father doesn’t meet the bus and Joey has to walk miles to a shack out in the country. His father isn’t home; when he does show up days later, it’s clear he doesn’t want Joey there. There is no food, no way to wash clothes, no telephone. The shack stinks. At school, both the students- especially the king of the jocks- and some of the staff decide instantly they don’t like Joey; he’s new, and he’s the son of a man that the entire town loathes and despises. And when he manages to scrape enough change together to call Boris from a pay phone, Boris is distant, belittles what Joey is going through and finally tells him not to call again. Life has gone from pretty darn good to pure hell for Joey. And it just keeps getting worse. His father is a grave robber. The all pervasive stink is from handling putrescent bodies. This is Joey’s new life. You think all this is bad? Wait. It gets worse.

How Joey adapts to this new life is surprising. His new life takes many turns, none good, but it’s what he feels he must do to survive, to have someone, anyone, approve of him in this loveless landscape. The things he learns to do, the things that make up his new ‘normal’, are things that would make most people run screaming into the night. Decay, madmen, physical mutilation, starvation, poverty. His old self peels away, leaving just the core of Joey.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. People who are bothered by vivid descriptions of death and decay should avoid it. There are problems- sometimes the book moves much to slowly. I can’t understand why Boris acted as he did and the author never goes back to that. But this is an oddly compelling book. I had to know what would happen next, for good or bad. The grave digging and the rotting corpses are minutely, almost lovingly, described. The author makes it clear through all this that when your world changes dramatically and you’re left without a support system, you’ll come to accept anything as normal, and that’s a scary thing to learn.