The Listeners - Hardcover

Demchick, Harrison

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1610880811 ISBN 13: 9781610880817

Publisher: Bancroft Press, 2012

Synopsis

"Before the plague, and the quarantine, fourteen-year-old Daniel Raymond had only heard of the Listeners. They were a gang, or at least that’s what his best friend Katie’s police officer father had said. They were criminals, thieves, monsters―deadly men clearly identifiable by the removal of their right ears.That’s what Daniel had heard. But he didn't know.He didn't know much in those early days. He didn't know how the plague began, but then, no one did. The doctors and emergency medical personnel said it was airborne, and highly contagious. They said those infected became distorted both inside and out, and very, very dangerous.Then the helicopters came and took the doctors away, and no one said much of anything after that.Except the police officers. They said they'd provide food and order, in exchange for guns and, ultimately, anything else they felt like taking.Daniel’s mother went out for toilet paper. She never came back. He hasn't heard from Katie since the phones went dead. And with his real family gone and surrogate family unreachable, Daniel, scared and alone, has nothing except the walls of his apartment, the window shattered, the poisonous air seeping in.That’s when the Listeners arrive. Derek, the one-eared man with the big, soulful eyes, promises protection, and hope, and the choice not to sit alone and wait to die in some horrific way. He offers a brotherhood under the watch of their leader, the prophet Adam. He offers a place in the world to come.A harrowing work of literary horror, The Listeners, Harrison Demchick’s electrifying debut, is a dark and terrifying journey into loneliness, desperation, and the devastating experience of one young boy in a world gone mad."

About this title

About the Author

Raised in Baltimore, Maryland on a steady diet of magical realism, literary fiction, science-fiction, and Spider-Man comics, Harrison Demchick spent most of his formative years inside his own head, working out strange thoughts and ideas that would eventually make their way into stories, screenplays, and songs.

He went to Oberlin College to attain one of today's most notoriously useless degrees, a BA in English with a creative writing concentration, but then actually used it, working the last seven years as a book editor. Harrison is also a screenwriter, and the winner of the 2011 Baltimore Screenwriters Competition.

The Listeners was born in an independent study in fiction during Harrison's senior semester at Oberlin. Originally a series of interconnected short stories, it was adapted first into a screenplay, and then, from the screenplay, into his first novel. Harrison hopes ardently that The Listeners will catch on in such a way that he doesn t have to market it.

He lives still in Baltimore, working on a musical and various screenplays.

Review

Prick up your ear(s) for a compelling new voice surging over the literary landscape. In his startling novel The Listeners, Harrison Demchick has crafted a story of horror and heart, of humanity both abject and noble, of a world relentlessly bleak where a rare drop of hope seeps through the cracks. Like the young protagonist, you'll struggle to figure out who the good guys are and find yourself agonizing over whether any of us can be good guys when the situation is desperate and the stakes at their highest. Strap yourself in and make sure the pistol's in the glove box--this novel is not the sunny highway along the beach but the dirt road in the night woods, when the GPS fails and your good sense tells you to turn around, but, by God, sometimes you need to see what you're made of. Get off the main road and read The Listeners. --Ron Cooper, acclaimed author of cult hit Purple Jesus, a ''literary event of the first magnitude'' (Washington Post)

Written with an Armageddon pen, envisioned with desolate wasteland eyes, and heard by a single, knowing ear, Harrison Demchick's The Listeners provides a peephole to a ravaged world of survivors living day to day with the burden of being human. With stylistic and emotional flourishes largely missing from the post-apocalyptic subgenre, this is a novel that really shouldn t be missed! --Benjamin Kane Ethridge, Bram Stoker Award-winning author of Black & Orange and Dungeon Brain

The Listeners is a gripping story which does only what the best fiction can do: challenge us to examine our own lives. Harrison Demchick weaves a harrowing tale of a young boy searching for his own identity in a world gone to hell. --M. Dal Walton, producer of Borderland, Blind Horizon, and Day of the Dead

The Listeners is a gripping story which does only what the best fiction can do: challenge us to examine our own lives. Harrison Demchick weaves a harrowing tale of a young boy searching for his own identity in a world gone to hell. --M. Dal Walton, producer of Borderland, Blind Horizon, and Day of the Dead

About this edition

• Publisher: Bancroft Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1610880811
• ISBN 13: 9781610880817
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 308