HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

Now available

“Riveting…paints a striking picture of America’s collapse. Readers will be enthralled.” – Publishers Weekly
“A relentlessly thrilling and endlessly entertaining page-turner; the kind of book that keeps you up way past bedtime.” – Jonathan Evison, New York Times bestselling author of Lawn Boy
“Has a literary sensibility with a thriller’s premise and pacing while exploring vital questions within post-apocalyptic America.” – Vanessa Lillie, Amazon bestselling author of Little Voices and For the Best

Stark in its treatment of a culture’s fall and revealing in its contrast between one’s willingness to embrace the alien in the name of virtue… House of the Rising Sun serves as an allegory for what happens when folks steel their sense of materialism and entitlement in lieu of their potential for virtue and independence from the cold front of human vitriol.” – Michel Sabbagh for The Southern Review of Books

Both a frightening apocalyptic story set in the southern United States and a character-focused, deeply moving literary thriller.

When a strange new star appears in the sky, human life instantly grinds to a halt. Across the world, anything and everything electronic stops working completely.

At first, the event seems like a bizarre miracle to Seth Black—it interrupts his suicide attempt and erases gambling debt that threatened to destroy his family. But when Seth and his wife, Natalie, realize the electricity isn’t coming back on, that their the food supplies won’t last, they begin to wonder how they and their two sons will survive.

Meanwhile, screenwriter Thomas Phillips—an old friend of Natalie’s—has just picked up Skylar Stover, star of his new movie, at the airport when his phone goes dead and planes begin to fall from the sky.

Thomas has just completed a script about a similar electromagnetic event that ended the world. Now, he’s one of the few who recognizes what’s happening and where it will lead.

When Thomas and Skylar decide to rescue Natalie and Seth, the unwilling group must attempt to survive together as the world falls apart. They try to hide in Thomas’s home and avoid desperate neighbors, but fear they’ll soon be roaming the streets with starving refugees and angry vigilantes intent on forming new governments. It’s all they can do to hold on to each other and their humanity.

Yet all the while, unbeknownst to them, Aiden Christopher—a bitter and malignant man leveraging a crumbling society to live out his darkest, most amoral fantasies—is fighting to survive as well. And he’s on a collision course with Thomas, Skylar, and the Black family…

READ MY OTHER NOVELS

The Boys of Summer

 Thomas World

The God Particle

Rift

RECENT POSTS

House of the Rising Sun Excerpts

Typically a novel excerpt will feature the book's first several pages, but I've decided to try something different for House of the Rising Sun. In part because the story begins with a suicide attempt and also because there is more to the novel than planes falling out...

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What Prepper Fiction Says about the War for America’s Soul

During research for an upcoming project I found myself unexpectedly plunged into the murky depths of self-published novels written on the topic of civilizational collapse. In these stories, the most common cause for the "Fall" is an electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a...

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Richard Cox: World Famous Author. Amateur golfer. Bomb hitter.

Welcome to richardcox.net. This is where I shamelessly self-promote the novels I write. My upcoming book is called House of the Rising Sun. You should totally pre-order it before all the copies are gone.

P.S. I’m not really world famous, but I helped my friend, Brian, become a little bit famous. And I starred in the classic 2007 film Brett and Richard Play Golf: The Movie.