Make Sure You Die Screaming
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Verve Books
Published:29th Jan '26
Should be back in stock very soon
When their mother calls with news that their MAGA-pilled, conspiracy-theorist father has gone missing, the newly unemployed queer narrator of Make Sure You Die Screaming does what anyone would do: steals their ex-boyfriend's BMW and races from Chicago to deep-red Arkansas on a mission to kidnap their estranged father and bring him home.
Now, with a bottle of premixed margarita jiggling in the cupholder and the narrator's brand-new garbage goth bestie, Yivi, screaming through night terrors in the passenger seat, our hero hurtles toward a family reunion from hell. Along the way, they experiment with Yivi's mystery pills, elude a relentless stalker and outrun some cops who believe the narrator committed a tragic murder.
An unflinching interrogation of class rage, economic (im)mobility, gender expression, the rot at the heart of capitalism and the political bloodbath dividing so many American families, Make Sure You Die Screaming is the loud, funny, suspenseful road trip novel of our times.
The novel's DNA echoes: Burroughs in the fractured momentum and feverish language; Thompson in the pharmaceutical velocity and satirical rage; and something of Frazier's Cold Mountain in its damaged soul moving through a politically riven South, seeking something that may no longer exist... Make Sure You Die Screaming ultimately earns its fury. A queer novel about estrangement and grief that refuses sentimentality without abandoning love. A road novel about America that refuses optimism without abandoning forward motion. Carlstrom has written something mean and strange and necessary about the cost of surviving a family, a country, yourself, and still finding community on the other side of the wreckage -- Scene Magazine
'a book that feels incredibly of the moment' -- Ilana Masas * LA Times *
Zee Carlstrom's exhilarating debut * Elle Magazine USA - Best Queer Books of 2025 *
Carlstrom creates a youthful voice that swells with rancour at every kind of inequity (class most of all) and flirts with an almost nihilistic worldview. It's a novel sparked by the kind of modern political polarisation that divides families, Carlstrom is astute enough to suggest that parallels may be found at both poles, as this queer road trip careens from blue heartland to red. -- Sydney Morning Herald
ISBN: 9780857309426
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
224 pages