Temperature: Dead and Rising

There’s a whole lot of living, dying, loving, and killing in author Adam Santo’s debut novel, Temperature: Dead and Rising. As dark as it is funny, this black fantasy mocks the living, the dead, and everything in between. It’s a wildly morbid tale about a young woman’s experience in cheating death and falling in love after she dies.

Sally Mertill is a pretty, if ordinary, twenty-something-year-old woman. She manages a Kmart and likes to hike. She lives in Colorado, enjoys her friends, and makes the most of what’s offered until one afternoon she’s driving a carload of her best pals back to Green Mountain Falls. They’ve spent the day poking around Pike’s Peak and looking as far as they can see, but everything changes. In a flash they careen off the side of the mountain. With no guardrails it’s not surprising that no one survives. And yet within days, Bocnic Drewings will call upon the metal drawer where her body awaits an autopsy. For whatever reason the powers that be have chosen Sally to join the ranks of the undead—and there’s a kick, Sally also possesses a power only one other undead has ever had, which is to control and bring back anything that has died. As Bocnic teaches her the ropes of not living, it becomes obvious that not all the undead share her enthusiasm for life—or have a heart. Demric Longshoff and his church want her for her power. Mathyas, a leader of a rival undead clan, longs for Sally’s demise and will do what he can to ensure it. In a glorious bit of satire, readers will hope for a romance between Sally and Bocnic, and that Sally comes out alive even if she’s already dead.