The Unrecovered (Smiling Flu)

The virus doesn’t kill you. The smile does.
Forty-eight-year-old recluse Sarah Sampson thought her father died in Vietnam. She was wrong.
As a strange new flu devastates the country—leaving only grinning corpses—a breaking news clip shatters Sarah’s reality: her father, alive. He’s the only known person to survive the infection.
Sarah and her K-9 companions must flee their Montana ranch and cross a fractured America to find the man who vanished fifty years ago. How did he survive? Why didn’t he come home? And can she reach him before she, too, begins to smile?
In Washington, D.C., Dr. Carl Parks believes he’s treating a kindly elderly man—until his patient begins mumbling about a government coverup, experimental treatments… and a cure. But a stroke locks the antidote inside a damaged mind. Can Carl tease the truth from his patient’s fractured memory before the country slips past saving?
Catch the flu, feel the joy, die smiling.
A character-driven, multi-POV pandemic thriller for fans of Station Eleven, The Stand, and Contagion.
Buy The Unrecovered and discover the moment everything changed.

Len M. Ruth is the author of horror novels The Pull, Rachael's Apocalypse Dairy I & II, The Unrecovered, and Tales of the Doomed. His stories were published in the anthology Satan Rides your Daughter, and featured in the Flash Fiction Forum. You can find his novels wherever fine eBooks are sold.

Len is part of the LGBTQ community and lives with his partner, Em, and dog Cooper in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada.