This belongs on a bookshelf next to Neil Gaiman and China Mieville. – Nick D., WA Consolation St. Marie arrives at a high school in Phoenix, Arizona, with earrings made of fangs and a coat of feathers billowing around her. On her first day she clinches a boyfriend, Critter Ocampo. By the next day his two best friends are hers too, Liv and Scott, a couple with deep love and deeper secrets. Prom night, the squad drives into the desert. They’ve planned a ritual to welcome their new lives: Liv as a video game designer, Scott as a shaman, and Critter’s future with Con, one he hasn’t told her yet. What they hadn’t planned… arms tripling in length, twisting around a head and suffocating one of their party. An impossible murder. The perpetrator? A creature of the Necraria, a series of worlds where detritivores consume the soul-bodies of the dead. To find the murderer, the squad will have to die a ritual death, descend into the Necraria, fight their way through its sublime, skin-crawling realms, and then… Be afraid of then… Forever pain, then. An action-packed journey into a new mythology, The Necrarian is the first book of The Universals series. theuniversalsbook.tumblr.com