Suburbia. Shady, tree-lined streets, well-tended lawns and cozy homes. A nice, quiet place to grow up. Unless you are teenage Meg or her crippled sister, Susan. On a dead-end street, in the dark, damp basement of the Chandler house, Meg and Susan are left captive to the savage whims and rages of a distant aunt who is rapidly descending into madness. It is a madness that infects all three of her sons and finally the entire neighborhood. Only one troubled boy stands hesitantly between Meg and Susan and their cruel, torturous deaths. A boy with a very adult decision to make.
In this humorously irreverent take on zombies, Ax Handel is a present-day nineteen-year-old pizza delivery guy with a short fuse who is determined to take control of his wildly unpredictable life. His comical attempts to make sense of his relationships with his outrageous family members usually end up in disaster. Suddenly, his life changes—possibly for the better—when zombies stumble out of a nearby cemetery. Life has never been easy for Ax and his mother, and they refuse to be scared off by a horde of the dying impaired. Without any help from Ma, whose hard-living, heavy-metal past has left her strangely sympathetic to the plight of the zombies, or his volatile ex-girlfriend, Zenobia, who's certain he's a head case, or even his zoned-out fugitive father, it’s up to Ax to protect his little town of Karbunkle and what little he owns, while getting revenge on some bad-mannered, lumbering stiffs.
For Joanna, her husband, Walter, and their children, the move to beautiful Stepford seems almost too good to be true. It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret—a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.
At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.
Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's, this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation who have experienced sex, drugs, and disaffection at too early an age, in a world shaped by casual nihilism, passivity, and too much money—a place devoid of feeling or hope.
Clay comes home for Christmas vacation from his Eastern college and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and absolute moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago, and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars, and underground rock clubs and also into the seamy world of L.A. after dark.