six teenagers holed up in a school, barricading the doors against the zombie invasion outside. So what happens when the wrong people survive? the ones who didn't want to survive before the world went to hell? after her sister ran away, leaving sloane alone in the path of her father's rage, she had no support system in place to fill the gap, and became suicidal. her father has been physically abusing sloane and her sister for years, and the two of them formed this intensely close bond that never allowed anyone else in. sloane is not a fan of emotional outpourings. nobody is a fan of emotional outpourings, are they? or am i projecting again? so let's just talk about this character. More often than not, trauma leads to a retreat. trauma does not build character, but how someone responds to trauma is the true and most telling test of character. these people have probably never experienced trauma.

There are people who believe that trauma builds character. This isn't a zombie book so much as a zombie framing device to explore damage and the difficulties of making yourself vulnerable in front of someone - of communication's pitfalls and the numbing effects of trauma. When everything is gone, what do you hold on to? But as the days crawl by, the motivations for survival change in startling ways and soon the group's fate is determined less and less by what's happening outside and more and more by the unpredictable and violent bids for life― and death―inside. As Sloane eagerly waits for the barricades to fall, she's forced to witness the apocalypse through the eyes of five people who actually want to live. Now seems like the perfect time to give up. Six months ago, her world collapsed and since then, she's failed to find a reason to keep going. To Sloane Price, that doesn't sound so bad. One bite is all it takes to kill a person and bring them back as a monstrous version of their former self. Six students have taken cover in Cortege High but shelter is little comfort when the dead outside won't stop pounding on the doors. Available now: I'M THE GIRL, the new 'brutally captivating' ( Publishers Weekly, starred review) queer thriller from Courtney Summers, based loosely on The Epstein case and 'not for the faint of heart' ( The New York Times)

Courtney summers books in order