Ex Utero

Blankets meets Pet Sematary in the long-awaited comeback from the author of The End of the Fucking World and I Am Not Okay With This, a crossover horror story set in the early ’90s, in which a desperate suburban teen brings his mother back from the dead.

Josh Mort is a 16-year-old nerd living in a small American town in the early 1990s. He lives with his checked-out father and his younger brother, Pete. He has a best friend, Greta, who he secretly loves, and a serial bully, Corey, who won't leave him alone. His pregnant mother, Lindsay, died the year before, officially in a car accident, but her past suggests otherwise.

One day, while trying to bury his cat (run over by his drunken father) in the woods behind the local cemetery, Josh discovers a mysterious old book, which turns out to be a book of black magic containing various spells, including one on how to revive the dead... Ex Utero, dripping in grunge atmosphere, mines familiar thematic territory for fans of Forsman’s previous bestsellers: raw adolescence, young romance, slowly building tension, and those small cracks in reality that make everything more and more unsettling—all sprinkled with a perfectly controlled touch of the fantastic. Forsman is a master of his craft, and he proves it a little more with each new book. Ex Utero is Forsman's most accomplished work to date, a horror story that masks an exploration of personal family trauma and how to reconcile one’s complex relationship with a parent after their death.