House of the Rising Sun

Book excerpt: Both a frightening apocalyptic story set in the southern United States and a character-focused, deeply moving literary thriller. What would happen if technology all over the world suddenly stopped working? When a strange new star appears in the sky, human life instantly grinds to a halt. Across the world, anything and everything electronic stops working completely. At first, the event seems like a bizarre miracle to Seth Black—it interrupts his suicide attempt and erases gambling debt that threatened to destroy his family. But when Seth and his wife, Natalie, realize the electricity isn't coming back on, that their the food supplies won't last, they begin to wonder how they and their two sons will survive. Meanwhile, screenwriter Thomas Phillips—an old friend of Natalie’s—has just picked up Skylar Stover, star of his new movie, at the airport when his phone goes dead and planes begin to fall from the sky. Thomas has just completed a script about a similar electromagnetic event that ended the world. Now, he's one of the few who recognizes what's happening and where it will lead. When Thomas and Skylar decide to rescue Natalie and Seth, the unwilling group must attempt to survive together as the world falls apart. They try to hide in Thomas's home and avoid desperate neighbors, but fear they’ll soon be roaming the streets with starving refugees and angry vigilantes intent on forming new governments. It’s all they can do to hold on to each other and their humanity. Yet all the while, unbeknownst to them, Aiden Christopher—a bitter and malignant man leveraging a crumbling society to live out his darkest, most amoral fantasies—is fighting to survive as well. And he's on a collision course with Thomas, Skylar, and the Black family . . .