Richard Kadrey's brilliant young adult horror novel, in paperback just in time for All Hallow's. From my original review:
Just in time for Hallowe'en, Richard "Sandman Slim" Kadrey's publishers have released Dead Set, a young adult novel about a San Francisco teenager who ventures into the Egyptian underworld to rescue her punk father from the clutches of an evil moon-goddess.
Zoe is a junior in high-school whose mother has moved them into a small, crappy apartment in San Francisco's down-and-out Tenderloin district after the death of her father. The family has been screwed royally by the insurance company, and Zoe herself is living a dazed half-life in her new high-school, snapping the rubber band around her wrist that she wears to remind herself not to go back to cutting herself. But one day, she cuts school and finds herself in a mysterious record-store, run my a Mr Ammut ("call me Emmet") who has strange records that let you relive the experiences of the dead. He can put her back in touch with her father, and all it will cost is a lock of her hair.
What follows is a fantastic supernatural horror novel with deep punk roots and enough cussing, frank sex-talk and drugs to get this book banned in school libraries around the world — with luck, generating the publicity necessary to put it in the hands of every screwed up, amazing kid who needs to read it. Kadrey's underworld is a gloomy mirror of the overworld with all its injustice and broken dreams, and Zoe's battle with her fear and her honorable spirit put her in enough jeopardy for six novels.
Here's a preview of the book, with the first two chapters free to read.
