This Delicious Death by Kayla Cottingham
In this queer YA offering from My Dearest Darkest author Kayla Cottingham, a group of four best friends head to the SoCal desert for a music festival armed with flower crowns, body glitter, and a cooler full of . . . synthetic human organs? Umm?!? As it so happens, Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine aren’t your average teenagers — they’re ‘ghouls,’ aka zombies in recovery. The melting of arctic permafrost three years earlier unleashed a pathogen across the world that turned some people into feral, flesh-eating zombie-like creatures, until scientists developed synthetic human meat that satisfied their hunger. Although the world has mostly returned to normal, prejudice against ghouls is still rampant.
The first night of the festival Val suddenly goes feral without warning and ends up devouring a fellow concert-goer, and it’s not long before more people start disappearing, too. When the girls figure out that someone is drugging ghouls in order to purposefully get them to attack, they realize they’re the only ones who can prevent an all-out apocalypse from destroying not only the music festival, but the entire country.
