Blankets meets Pet Sematary in the long-awaited comeback from the author of The End of the Fucking World and I Am Not Okay With This, a crossover horror story set in the early 90s, in which a desperate suburban teen brings his mother back from the dead.

Josh Mort is a 16-year-old nerd living in a small American town in the early 1990s. He lives with his checked-out father and his younger brother, Pete. He has a best friend, Greta, who he secretly loves, and a serial bully, Corey, who won’t leave him alone. His pregnant mother, Lindsay, died the year before, officially in a car accident, but her past suggests otherwise.

One day, while trying to bury his cat (run over by his drunken father) in the woods behind the local cemetery, Josh discovers a mysterious old book, which turns out to be a book of black magic containing various spells, including one on how to revive the dead…Ex Utero, dripping in grunge atmosphere, mines familiar thematic territory for fans of Forsmans previous bestsellers: raw adolescence, young romance, slowly building tension, and those small cracks in reality that make everything more and more unsettlingall sprinkled with a perfectly controlled touch of the fantastic. Forsman is a master of his craft, and he proves it a little more with each new book. Ex Utero is Forsman’s most accomplished work to date, a horror story that masks an exploration of personal family trauma and how to reconcile ones complex relationship with a parent after their death.