Kung Fu High School - Softcover

Gattis, Ryan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374182264 ISBN 13: 9780374182267

Publisher: MCD x FSG Originals, 2017

Synopsis

“[An] ultraviolent, dystopian debut novel from Ryan Gattis, the spawn of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Cormier.” ―Publishers Weekly

High school is brutal, but Jen B. has learned to pick her battles. Except the first one―that one is mandatory. At the Good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King High School, aka “Kung Fu,” everyone gets beaten to a pulp in their first week. Getting “kicked in” helps Ridley, the drug kingpin who runs the school and everyone in it, maintain order. He's the reason that 99.5 percent of the students know some form of martial art, and why they suit up in body armor and blades before class.

Jen’s life is savage but simple until the day her cousin Jimmy, a world-famous kung fu champion, shows up. Everyone at Kung Fu wants a piece of him, especially Ridley, but Jimmy’s made a promise never to fight again―a promise that sends the whole school hurtling toward a colossal clash, ending in an epic bloody showdown.

Ryan Gattis’s dystopian satire, Kung Fu High School, is a cult classic in the making―a darkly comic, gleefully graphic, barbaric opera about loyalty, survival, and the horrors of high school, which earned comparison with the works of such icons as Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Price, and Anthony Burgess.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Wear your gear. Bring your blades. Back your family. Fight for your life.

MLK High School has collapsed into Kung Fu High School--where Jen B. and her brother, Cue, belong to one of two gangs still standing against the puppet principal and the drug kingpin who pulls his strings. Cousin Jimmy--a world-champion martial arts master of mythic stature--arrives in town after swearing to his mother that he'll never fight again. His rep precedes him and everyone's itching to see him "kicked in"--Kung Fu's brutal initiation ritual. But he won't break his vow and defend himself, so Cue steps in when things go too far. Soon, a surprise counterstrike sends Kung Fu spinning toward one final, raging battle. Teachers flee, students break out full weaponry, and Jimmy must make a decision that will brand him a coward--or a hero.

"Once upon a time, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho set the standard for insane violence, gruesome detail and plain upsetting excess. But Ellis is about to be eclipsed by another young American, Ryan Gattis. In Kung Fu High School the practise of total bodily destruction has never been more thorough, or more moving."--Time Out London

Ryan Gattis has a BFA in creative writing from Chapman University and a master's in creative writing from the University of East Anglia. He currently lives in Colorado, where he grew up.

Discussion guide available at www.HarcourtBooks.com.

About the Author:

Ryan Gattis is the author of All Involved and Safe, a literary thriller about a reformed gang member working as a safecracker for the DEA. He lives in Los Angeles.

About this edition

• Publisher: MCD x FSG Originals
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0374182264
• ISBN 13: 9780374182267
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320