Pretty Hate Machine

Thomas is suffering immensely. As if high school weren’t hard enough, his father dies in a bizarre accident. While his mother seeks comfort in the company of Thomas’s uncle, a ghostly boy named Luther appears to Thomas - with knives for hands and rows of teeth like a prehistoric shark. Luther claims that Thomas’s father was murdered and that everything his mother and uncle say is a lie.

Between grief and growing paranoia, Thomas does not know whom to believe: his friends, teachers, and mother, who tell him grief is hard but transient - or the deranged Luther, who pulls him into a bloody whirlwind of conspiracies, revenge, and slaughter and exposes the rot around him? Thomas must fight for the truth about his father’s death while trying to keep his new “friend” from carrying out a massacre. But that truth may be far darker than Thomas can bear ...

• Themes: grief, paranoia, manipulation
• Elements: conspiracy, murder, psychological horror, brutal violence
• Mood: dark, oppressive, nerve-shredding