About this item
"[An] ultraviolent, dystopian debut novel from Ryan Gattis, the spawn of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Cormier." -- Publishers WeeklyHigh 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, aka "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 never to fight again -- a promise that sends the whole school hurtling toward a colossal clash, ending in an epic bloody showdown.Ryan Gattis's dystopian satire, Kung Fu High School, is a cult classic in the making -- a darkly comic, gleefully graphic, barbaric opera about loyalty, survival, and the horrors of high school, which earned comparison with the works of such icons as Chuck Palahniuk, Richard Price, and Anthony Burgess.
About the Author
Ryan Gattis is a writer & educator. His most recent novel, SAFE, is a heist thriller about a DEA safecracker gone rogue, ripping off gang-owned drug safes in order to help citizens hurt during the market crash of 2008. It's essentially Robin Hood Noir. The book is set in the same world of South Central L.A. as his previous novel, ALL INVOLVED: A Novel of the 1992 L.A. Riots, which was grounded in 2.5 years of research & background spent with former Latino gang members, firefighters, nurses, & other L.A. citizens who lived through it. ALL INVOLVED won the American Library Association's Alex Award & the Lire Award for Noir of the Year in France; translated into 11 languages, it has been called "a high-octane speedball of a read" by The New York Times & its film rights were acquired by HBO. Gattis is also the author of KUNG FU HIGH SCHOOL (Out 09/2017) . He lives and writes in Los Angeles, where he is a member of the street art crew UGLARworks & a founding board member of 1888, a Southern California literary arts non-profit.
