The Taking of Jake Livingston

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Survival is not a guarantee in this chilling horror novel where a teenage medium doesn’t know which is worse . . . confronting a school-shooter-turned-vengeful-ghost or enduring his racist high school.

“Spine-chilling YA horror.”—The Boston Globe

“A teenage version of Get Out . . . Douglass looks at race and trauma and death with a comical and horror-esque twist.”—The Root

Living in two worlds is exhausting and no one knows this better than sixteen-year-old Jake Livingston. His working-class, diverse neighborhood is a far cry from the world of St. Clair Prep, where he is one of the only Black students, constantly at the mercy of racist teachers and peers who don’t understand him. But when his neighbor—a survivor of a grisly school shooting—is murdered and the bloody initials of the now-dead shooter, Sawyer Doon, are left on the entryway wall of Jake’s home, Jake is forced to confront another world he wishes he could escape—the world of the dead.

As a medium, Jake sees ghosts around him all the time. Most are harmless. Stuck in their death loops as they relive their deaths over and over again, they rarely interact with people. And while for most of his life Jake has avoided them, this time there is no running away. Sawyer was a troubled teen who shot and killed six kids at a local high school before taking his own life. Now he’s a powerful, vengeful ghost, and he has plans for his afterlife—plans that include Jake. When Sawyer begins stalking him, high school becomes a different kind of survival game—one Jake is not sure he can win.