The Devil by Name: A Novel

“Fever House and The Devil by Name are exciting, suspenseful, horrifying, and written at a flurry-of-punches pace. Read them now and you can thank me later.”—STEPHEN KING

No one expected the apocalypse would be broadcast via phone call. But in this chilling sequel to Fever House, anyone who managed to survive that doomsday call has a harrowing answer to the question, “Where were you when the Message came through?”

Five years after the event that drove most of the global population to madness, the world is overrun with the “fevered”—once-human, zombielike creatures drawn indiscriminately to violence and murder. In a campaign to restabilize the country, the massive corporation known as Terradyne Industries has merged with the U.S. government in a partnership of dubious motives, quarantining major American cities behind towering walls and corralling the afflicted there with the hope, they say, of developing a vaccine.

In Portland, where it all began, guilt-ridden detective John Bonner scours the city’s darkest corners for clues to humanity’s redemption. In New England, Katherine Moriarty mourns the devastating losses of her husband and son while in hiding from Terradyne. And across the ocean in France, a sixteen-year-old girl named Naomi Laurent discovers she has a disturbing and powerful gift—which may just be the key to the world’s salvation.

Equal parts gruesome and beautiful, The Devil by Name is a heart-stopping, breakneck saga of survival. As its characters’ paths inevitably collide across the ravaged landscape of a post-apocalyptic America, they are united by the desire to not just escape death but to carve out some way to live anew.

Everything starts and ends in the fever house.

Keith Rosson is the author of the novels Fever House, Smoke City, Road Seven, and The Mercy of the Tide, as well as the Shirley Jackson Award–winning story collection Folk Songs for Trauma Surgeons. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his partner and their two children.