Review: Rotters by Daniel Kraus

Rotters by Daniel Kraus recently won the 2012 Odyssey Award for its outstanding audiobook. I challenged myself to read or listen to all of the ALA YA book award winners this year and felt that I should listen rather than read this book since that is the format that earned the book its award.  Kirby Heybourne indeed do a masterful job reading this macabre and gruesome book. He used different voices for different people and his pacing and timing were excellent.  The only problem was that no matter how good a job Mr. Heyborne did with the narration, the story was still macabre and gruesome.

The story is told in the voice of Joey Crouch who has to move to Iowa to live with a father he has never met after the accidental death of his mother. At first his father is distant and elusive but soon Joey learns what his father does.  He is a grave robber. Even though he is repelled by this gruesome and horrifying activity Joey soon finds himself going along with his father and becoming a grave robber himself.


Even as I write this short summary of the book I marvel that I even finished listening to this whole book...hours upon hours of listening to it.  I am not a person who likes horror genre books and usually only accept gruesome topics if they are attached to a nonfiction book, so it is pretty amazing that I made it through this one to the end.  I must admit that there were some pretty exciting scenes that had me on the edge of my seat but mostly I had my hand over my mouth in horror of the thought of digging up corpses and relieving them of their treasures.  Yuck. Yuck. Yuck.

While listening one thought went through  my head repeatedly, what kind of research did Daniel Kraus do to be able to describe the contents of coffins and the decomposing bodies with as much detail as he used?  He obviously had done a lot of research.  I sure hope it was from books.  That's all I'll say on that subject!  Ha!

The book while quite well written did not appeal to me, obviously, but it may be just the thing for the student or adult who enjoys a twisted, macabre tale. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe may really relish this one.