Kung Fu High School

Chaos ensues when a pacifist kung fu champion enrolls in a high school ruled by a drug kingpin in “this ultraviolent, dystopian debut novel from Gattis, the spawn of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Cormier” (Publishers Weekly).

“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 practice of total bodily destruction has never been more thorough, or more moving.” —Time Out London

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

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, a.k.a. “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 to never fight again—a promise that sends the whole school hurtling toward a colossal, bloody showdown.

Kung Fu High School, Ryan Gattis’s dystopian satire, is a cult classic in the making—a darkly comic, gleefully graphic, barbaric opera about loyalty, survival, and the horrors of high school.

“Gattis creates a nightmarish, confrontational, and fascinating world . . . that forces readers to consider societal fears about youth and violence.” —Booklist