American Rapture

Sophie leads a life strictly regulated by her parents and the Catholic Church, both of which try to keep her as far as possible from the secular world and its sinful temptations. As a result, she is unaware of a virus tearing across the United States that causes those who contract it to suffer flu-like symptoms before they succumb to a vicious, feral lust. She takes off with strangers, who become her found family, to attempt to find her brother while avoiding both the illness and the violence that has engulfed the country. In this book, Leede combines an end-of-the-world story with a new twist on zombies. Sophie is thrust into a ferociously brutal world she was ill-prepared to manage even before the pandemic, but she navigates loss and her growing awareness of the religious trauma she has endured while learning to challenge the truths she’s been afraid to question. Featuring younger people fighting for survival, as in Alden Bell’s The Reapers Are the Angels, this novel shares the kind of violent zombie apocalypse presented in Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.