Inspection : a novel /

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Boys are being trained at one school for geniuses, girls at another. Neither knows the other exists--until now. The New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box invites you into a world of secrets and chills in a coming-of-age story like no other.

NOMINATED FOR THE BRAM STOKER AWARD * "Josh Malerman is a master at unsettling you--and keeping you off-balance until the last page is turned."--Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Blackbirds

J is a student at a school deep in a forest far away from the rest of the world.

J is one of only twenty-six students, all of whom think of the school's enigmatic founder as their father. J's peers are the only family he has ever had. The students are being trained to be prodigies of art, science, and athletics, and their life at the school is all they know--and all they are allowed to know.

But J suspects that there is something out there, beyond the pines, that the founder does not want him to see, and he's beginning to ask questions. What is the real purpose of this place? Why can the students never leave? And what secrets is their father hiding from them?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest, in a school very much like J's, a girl named K is asking the same questions. J has never seen a girl, and K has never seen a boy. As K and J work to investigate the secrets of their two strange schools, they come to discover something even more mysterious: each other.

Praise for Inspection

"Creepy. . . a novel whose premise is also claustrophobic and unsettling, but more ambitious than that of Bird Box . . . Inspection is rich with dread and builds to a dramatic climax." -- The Washington Post

"This unlikely cross between 1984 and Lord of the Flies tantalizes." -- Kirkus Reviews

"Malerman builds a striking world. . . . As he did in Bird Box , Malerman's crafted an irresistible scenario that's rich in possibility and thematic fruit. . . . Where [ Bird Box ] confined us behind a blindfold, Inspection rips it off." -- The A. V. Club

"A must read . . . It's a wonderful thing, digging into a new Josh Malerman novel--no idea what to expect, no clue where his twisted mind is going to take you." -- Cemetery Dance

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

Good Morning at the Parenthood! No boy had ever failed an Inspection. For this, J felt no anxiety as the steel door creaked open before him, as the faces of the Parenthood looked out, as the Inspectors stood against the far wall, each with a hand on the magnifying glasses hooked to their belts. J had done this every morning of his life, every morning he could remember, and, despite Q's theories on likelihoods and probabilities (his idea that eventually someone must fail in order to justify a lifetime of Inspections), J felt no doubt, no dread, no fear. "Enter, J," Collins called. Collins, the stuffiest, oldest, burliest Inspector of all. The man smelled of old textbooks. His belly hung so far over his belt D joked he kept an Alphabet Boy hidden in there. That's where we come from, D had said. But all the Alphabet Boys knew they came from the Orchard, having grown on the Living Trees. "Come on, then," Collins said. It was a wonder any words at all made it through the man's bushy brown mustache. J knew the Inspector did not speak for himself. D.A.D. must've given the signal it was time to begin. To the snickers of L, D, and Q behind him, J entered and removed his pajamas, folding them and placing them in a neat pile upon the steel end table by the Check-­Up room door. As the door was closing behind J, D called, "Shoulda showered, J!" And J pointed at him, the Alphabet Boys' gesture that meant, You're a jerk, brother. The door locked into place, his clothes nicely piled, J stepped to the pair of rubber footprints on the cold steel floor. Winter was close, arriving perhaps as soon as tomorrow. And while J enjoyed the Effigy Meet as much as his brothers, he liked to keep the cold outside. The Check-­Up room was as frigid as any he knew in the Turret. "Turn," Inspector Collins said. He and Jeffrey observed from a distance, always the first step of the morning's Inspection. The dogs breathed heavy behind the glass door beyond the men. J turned to his left. He heard the leather of D.A.D.'s red jacket stretching. The man, as of yet out of sight, must have crossed his arms or sat back in his chair. Winter outside the Turret could be brutal. Some years were worse than others. J, nearing his thirteenth birthday along with his twenty-­three brothers, had experienced twelve winters. And with each one, Professor Gulch warned the boys about depression. The sense of loneliness that came from being stuck inside a ten-­story tower, when the Orchard and the Yard froze over, when even the pines looked too cold to survive. Hysteria, J thought. He shook his head, trying to roll the idea out his ear. It was a word he didn't like anywhere inside his head. As if the four syllables had the same properties as Rotts and Moldus, Vees and Placasores. The very diseases the Inspectors searched him for now. "Turn." Collins again. His gruff voice part and parcel of the Check-­Up room. Like the sound of clacking dishes in the cafeteria. Or the choral voices of his brothers in the Body Hall. "Cold," J said, turning his back to the Inspectors, facing now the locked door. It was often chilly in the Check-­Up room; unseen breezes, as if the solid-­steel walls were only an illusion, and the distorted reflections unstable drawing on the wind. J imagined a slit somewhere, a crack in those walls, allowing pre-­winter inside. It was similar, J thought, to the veterinarian's office in Lawrence Luxley's book Dogs and Dog Days. The brilliant leisure writer had described the poor animals' reactions so well: Unwelcoming, cold, it was as though Doctor Grand had intentionally made it so, so that the dogs understood the severity of their visits. And still, despite the inhospitable environs, the dogs understood that the room was good for them. That their lives depended on these regular visits. Some of them were even able to suppress their basest instincts . . . the ones that told them to run. J had memorized all of Lawrence Luxley's books. Many of the Alphabet Boys had. "Turn." J did as he was told. Always had. The routine of the Inspections was as ingrained in his being as chewing before swallowing. And with this third turn, he faced D.A.D. A thrill ran through him, as it always had, twelve years running, to see D.A.D. for the first time in the day. The bright-­red jacket and pants were like a warm fire in the cold Check-­Up room. Or the sun coming up. "Did you sleep well, J?" D.A.D.'s voice. Always direct, always athletic. J wasn't the only Alphabet Boy who equated the man's voice with strength. Comfort. Security. Knowledge. "I actually did not," J said, his twelve-­year-­old voice an octave deeper than it was only a year ago. "I dreamt something terrible." "Is that right?" D.A.D.'s hazel eyes shone above his black beard, his hair black, too. J had black hair. Just like his D.A.D. "I'm intrigued. Tell me all about it." "Turn," Collins said. And J turned to face the Inspectors and the dogs all over again. No longer facing D.A.D., the color red like a nosebleed out of the corner of his eye now, J recounted his unconscious struggle. He'd been lost in a Yard four hundred times the size of the one he enjoyed every day. He described the horror of not being able to find his way back to the Turret. "Lost?" D.A.D. echoed. The obvious interest in his voice was as clear to J as the subtle sound of his leather gloves folding around his pencil. Yes, J told him, yes, he'd felt lost in the dream. He'd somehow strayed too far from the Turret and the Parenthood within. He couldn't remember how exactly--­the actual pines framing the Yard in were not present in this dream. But he was certainly very anxious to get back. He could hear his floor mates Q, D, and L calling from a distance but could not see the orange bricks of the tower. He couldn't make out the iron spires that framed the roof's ledge like a lonely bottom row of teeth. Teeth J and the other Alphabet Boys had looked through many nights, having found the nerve to sneak up to the roof. Nor could he see the tallest of the spires, the single iron tooth that pointed to the sky like a fang. Gone were the finite acres of the Yard, the expanse of green lawn between himself and the Turret. So were the reflections in the many elongated windows of the many floors. In their stead was endless green grass. And fog. "Well, winter is upon us," D.A.D. said. His voice was control. Always. Direction. Solution. Order. "Couldn't even see the fang, hmm? No sign of the Parenthood at all. No sign of home." J thought of the yellow door on the roof, visible all the way from the Yard below. He thought of the solid orange bricks and how, on a summer day, the Turret resembled a sunrise. "No," he said, shaking his head, looking to the silent faces of the Inspectors, who quietly fingered the magnifying glasses at their belts. J understood now, as a twelve-­year-­old boy, something he hadn't at eleven: The Inspections didn't begin when the Inspectors used their glasses. It began the second you walked through the door. "You must have been so scared," D.A.D. continued. His voice was fatherhood. Administration. Always. "But, tell me, did you eventually find the Turret before waking?" J was quiet a moment. He scratched at his right elbow with his left hand. He yawned a second time. Hysteria, he thought again. He actually made fists, as if to knock the thought out of his head. Professor Gulch taught psychology and often stressed the many ways a boy's mind might turn on itself: mania, attention deficit, persecution, dissociation from reality, depression, and hysteria. For J, it had all sounded like distant impossibilities. Conditions to be studied for the purpose of study alone. Certainly J wasn't afraid of one day experiencing these states of mind himself. Yet here he was . . . twelve years old . . . and how else could he explain the new, unknown feelings he'd been having of late? What would Gulch call the sense of isolation, of being incomplete, when he looked out across the Yard, toward the entrance to the many rows of the Orchard? To where the Living Trees grew? The boy recalled his childhood as though through a glass with residue of milk upon it. Unable to answer the simple question: Where do I come from? Another Lawrence Luxley line. A real zinger, as Q would say. But no, J thought, there in the Check-­Up room. He wasn't trying to answer that question at all. No boy had ever determined which of the cherry trees in the Orchard were the ones they had grown on. And as far as J knew, they were fine with that. Weren't they? Excerpted from Inspection by Josh Malerman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

In this strange, uneven horror novel, Malerman (Unbury Carol) depicts a mad couple's experiment in trying to separate the sexes. Deep in the woods of Michigan sits a complex full of young boys. There used to be one for every letter of the alphabet, but when J was just two, A and Z were sent to the Corner. The Alphabet Boys don't know what that means, exactly, but they know it's bad. They also don't know that the world holds anything but men. Raised by D.A.D., also known as Richard, they have no idea that women exist; Richard hypothesizes that this will make them smarter and less distracted. Three miles away sits a similar complex full of girls who have no knowledge of men. As the kids reach puberty, K, a Letter Girl, starts becoming more curious about the world around her. The inevitable end is sudden and bloody. The story is narrated by J, K, and Warren Bratt, a man hired to write all the leisure books the boys read. There are parts of this book that require near-impossible suspension of disbelief; no thought is given to what would happen if one of the kids turns out to be queer or transgender, for example, and some premises go unexplained, such as why Warren has suddenly developed a guilt complex 13 years in. Fans of bad horror movies might find the story fun, but if Malerman intends it to be a serious exploration of gender or parenting, it falls far short. Agent: Kristin Nelson, Nelson Literary. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Booklist Review

Malerman's (Bird Box, 2014) latest has all of the claustrophobic tension his fans crave, but this time the monsters are 100 percent human. The 12-year-old Alphabet Boys live in a tower in the woods of northern Michigan. They have been raised by their D.A.D., Richard, in an isolated world where women don't exist, part of an experiment to see if separating the sexes will allow true genius to be cultivated. And if there is a boys' tower, there's probably a girls' tower too. Every narrator, including adults and kids of both sexes, is unreliable either a deliberate liar or raised in a false world so much so that readers can't rely on their own assumptions about rules of character and plot. Malerman makes the horror of this impossible experiment appear completely plausible while thoughtfully contemplating grand issues like nature versus nurture, gender roles, and scientific ethics all of that, plus he manages to create a satisfyingly oppressive atmosphere. And yet, for all of this serious intensity, Inspection feels effortless; the story flows easily and at a compelling pace: think Shirley Jackson writing Lord of the Flies (1954). Hand to fans of Margaret Atwood or Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005).--Becky Spratford Copyright 2019 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

In a remote patch of forest, in old turreted towers, a group of 24 boys and another group of 25 girls, each assigned letters instead of names, are being raised as part of an experiment without knowledge of the outside world, each other, or the very existence of an opposite sex.The founder of this dark experiment, Richard (aka the boys' D.A.D.), is seeking to develop geniuses by eliminating the distractions of sex. The 12-year-old Alphabet Boys and 11-year-old Letter Girls have been taught that they grew on trees. The possible existence of God is omitted from their lessons and from the lesson-bearing novels that outside writers, including a tortured soul from Milwaukee, are paid to write. For Richard, "obedience trumped religion." Those who aren't obedient, notably boys A and Z and girl J, are taken to a mysterious basement room called the Corner, never to be seen again. But even at the risk of extreme punishment, the male J can't resist sneaking out to investigate his surroundings after the shattering discovery that things his adored D.A.D. is telling him are not true. J's fearless female counterpart, K, whose story converges with his, becomes even more determined to penetrate the lies and hold the so-called Parenthood behind them to account. Though one shocking plot turn is forced and the publisher needlessly gives away what would have been a beautifully orchestrated surprise, this unlikely cross between 1984 and Lord of the Flies tantalizes.Malerman, whose profile was significantly raised by the recent Netflix adaptation of his first novel, Bird Box (2014), delivers another freaky thriller. The book ultimately lacks real depth but still enhances his reputation as one of today's most unpredictable novelists. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Josh Malerman is an author from Britain who was short listed for the James Herbert Award for Horror writing for his title Bird Box. This title has also made the bestseller list in 2019.

(Bowker Author Biography)