Death, Murders, and Zombies - Richard Lowe

What would it take for an ordinary person to become a killer? Not rage, not desperation, not poverty or trauma - but logic. Careful, patient, internally consistent logic applied to a premise that is simply wrong.

That is the question at the heart of Death, Murder, and Zombies, a psychological horror novel that follows Karl Hendricks from directionless twenty-year-old to self-appointed assistant to Death itself.

Karl is living in his father's basement when his best friend Mike dies in a shooting that wasn't quite an accident. In the hospital aftermath, Karl has an encounter that changes everything: he meets Death, not as a concept or a metaphor, but as a supernatural entity going about its work. Death tells Karl he might become something else entirely. Karl takes this as a calling.

What follows is a methodical transformation. Karl studies death from a distance, then up close. He builds a false identity, funds his operation through ransomware attacks on small businesses, and begins selecting victims he believes are suffering and ready to transition. He kills with clinical precision and tells himself it is mercy. His logic is airtight. His logic is also completely wrong.

When Death finally confronts Karl directly and names him what he is - a serial killer with delusions of cosmic purpose - the encounter forces a decision that will have consequences far beyond anything Karl anticipated.

Death, Murder, and Zombies is told in the first person by a narrator who is always wrong about himself and always right about the facts. The horror is not supernatural, though supernatural elements are present throughout. The horror is the gap between what Karl believes he is doing and what the reader understands him to be doing. That gap widens with every chapter until it becomes something vast and irreversible.

Written for readers of Joe Hill, Paul Tremblay, and Thomas Tryon. Psychological horror. First-person unreliable narrator. Supernatural elements. Dark literary fiction.