Katzenjammer
My eyes are gone.
Cat lives in her high school. She never leaves, and for a long time her school has provided her with everything she needs. But now things are changing. The hallways contract and expand along with the school’s breathing, and the showers in the bathroom run a bloody red. Cat’s best friend is slowly turning into cardboard, and instead of a face, Cat has a cat mask made of her own hardened flesh.
Cat doesn’t remember why she is trapped in her school or why half of them—Cat included—are slowly transforming. Escaping has always been the one impossibility in her school’s upside-down world. But to save herself from the eventual self-destruction all the students face, Cat must find the way out. And to do that, she’ll have to remember what put her there in the first place.
Told in chapters alternating between the past and the present, Francesca Zappia weaves a spine-tingling, suspenseful, and haunting story about tragedy and the power of memories. Much like the acclaimed Eliza and Her Monsters, Katzenjammer features black-and-white illustrations by the author throughout the novel. Fans of Marieke Nijkamp’s This Is Where It Ends and Karen McManus’s One of Us Is Lying will lose themselves in the pages of this novel—or maybe in the treacherous hallways of the school.
Content Warnings: School bullying and violence, mention of eating disorders, and scenes of gore, blood, and death. Please take care of yourself while reading this book.
A Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection
A Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books Blue Ribbon book of 2022
Booklist (starred review)
“A surreal nightmare of a novel. . Readers are deposited unceremoniously into a high school, where students are trapped and many are grotesquely transformed. . . . The Changed and the Unchanged operate as separate factions with defined turf, but someone has begun gruesomely murdering students . . . As Cat slinks around the hallways trying to find the murderer, readers experience her frequent flashbacks . . . [that] also function to help Cat recover memories that shed some light on their current hellish existence. Zappia has created a visceral examination of trauma and violence.”
BookPage (starred review)
“Katzenjammer is a postmodern nightmare, a David Lynchian spiral of terror. Absurdist body horror mingles with slasher-film suspense, and the consistent suspension of reality gives the novel a disorienting, dreamlike quality. Yet Katzenjammer’s potency is undeniable.”
Bulletin for the Center of Children’s Books
“Teens stuck in the Sysphean cycle of bringing themselves to a place full of cruel people, uninspiring academia, and soul-crushing uniformity day after day will recognize this hellscape right away—it’s all high school, whether or not the monsters are human or disguised as something else.”
Kirkus Reviews
“A nihilistic hellscape of gore and high school politics.”
Publisher’s Weekly
“Zappia (Now Entering Addamsville) paints a sinister picture of modern teenage life in this disturbing high school horror novel.”