The Listeners

Before the plague, and the quarantine, fourteen-year-old Daniel Raymond had only heard of the Listeners. They were a gang, maybe even a cult, 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.

From Booklist

Demchick’s debut is not a zombie novel, but basically it is. A quarantine is established over part of a major American city after a plague turns citizens into “sickos”—boil-covered murderous lunatics. The only group prowling the streets is the cops, who go door-to-door collecting the remaining weapons. Abandoned, 14-year-old Daniel is taken in by the opposition group, a cult called the Listeners, who, at the behest of their prophet leader, cut off their right ears so as better to hear “only the voices of our brothers.” Although it’s never clear what it is they are supposedly hearing, the newly one-eared Daniel finds himself navigating the two-sided battle with an ever-shifting sense of who the good guys are. Sicko action is minimal, with Demchick instead following the workaday structure of Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) while also incorporating the kind of primary documents seen in Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006). Demchick places less emphasis on character than he does on evocative nonlinear prose, but his depth of focus is both confident and impressive. --Daniel Kraus

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 modern day'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.His literary debut, 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. For more information, visit: www.harrisondemchick.com

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