The Ravaged

by Norman Reedus, Frank Bill (Contribution by)

Overview

New York Times bestseller

Los Angeles Times bestseller

USA Today bestseller

The highly anticipated debut novel from Norman Reedus, acclaimed star of The Walking Dead

“This country wasn’t built on good—only fought for with good intentions.”

Jack’s dying mother told him, “Run and never look back.” He spent his life amassing wealth, but after losing his family, he has no one to share it with. Alone with his demons and a backpack, he heads to South America, where people with nothing teach him what matters.

After thrashing his dog-abusing boss, Hunter learns of his father’s death in a mysterious fire. Biker buddies Nugget and Itch ride with him from North Carolina to California. Stories from his father’s life help ease the struggles of small-town Americans. Hunter discovers a secret past.

Seventeen-year-old Anne flees Tennessee after her older brother attacks her. She whacks him with a skillet and hops a freight to Alabama with her best friend. Living hand to mouth, they build friendships, uncovering something they never had: family.

The Ravaged is a fast-paced, up-in-your-face novel of gritty realism, exploring three different personal quests with eerily parallel outcomes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781094166803
Publisher:	Blackstone Publishing
Publication date:	05/10/2022
Pages:	294
Sales rank:	1,168,493
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Playing everyone’s favorite crossbow-wielding zombie killer Daryl Dixon, actor Norman Reedus can currently be seen in the eleventh season of AMC’s hit series The Walking Dead.

Reedus can also be seen on AMC’s unscripted series Ride with Norman Reedus. Each hour-long episode follows Reedus and a friend touring a different city via motorcycle, checking out bike shops, tattoo parlors, bars, and local restaurants frequented by the chopper enthusiasts. Reedus’s companions range from actors to local bikers. Season four aired early 2020.

Reedus is best known for playing the role of Murphy MacManus in the cult movie The Boondock Saints, written and directed by Troy Duffy. Reedus stars opposite Sean Patrick Flanery and Willem Dafoe; he starred opposite Flanery again in the sequel, Boondock Saints 2: All Saints Day.

Reedus also previously starred in John Hillcoat’s ensemble cop drama Triple Nine with Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Anthony Mackie, and Aaron Paul; he played a corrupt cop that is blackmailed by the Russian mob to execute a virtually impossible heist. Reedus also starred opposite Diane Kruger, Lena Dunham, and Joshua Jackson in the French indie film Sky.

Additional film credits include Robert Kirkman’s sci-fi thriller Air from Sony Pictures; the indie drama Sunlight Jr., which premiered at the 2013 Tribeca Film Festival and also starred Naomi Watts and Matt Dillon; the Robert Redford directed feature The Conspirator, which chronicles the trial after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; the sci-fi feature thriller Pandorum with Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster; the Sony feature Cadillac Records opposite Adrien Brody; Six Ways to Sunday, 8mm, Beat, Deuces Wild, Blade 2, Gossip, The Notorious Bettie Page, and American Gangster.

Reedus is also an accomplished photographer as well as a burgeoning director having directed three short films. In October 2013, he released The Sun’s Coming Up … Like a Big Bald Head: Photographs by Norman Reedus, a book of his photography.

Reedus lives in New York.

Frank Bill is the author of the short-story collection Crimes in Southern Indiana and the novels Donnybrook, The Savage, and Back to the Dirt (2023). He lives and writes in southern Indiana.

Editorial Reviews

2022-03-16
This debut novel from Walking Dead actor Reedus follows three thematically connected yet narratively unrelated people as they journey to find themselves.

Hunter, a heavily tatted Iraq War vet and self-proclaimed gearhead, attacks his boss at the bike shop after catching him kicking a dog. “Hunter was old school,” the narrator says, rough-hewn but with strong moral fiber and a heart of gold. After learning his father died in a “mysterious house fire” in California, Hunter hops on his Buell S1 motorcycle alongside his buddies Nugget and Itch for a cross-country haul to execute the will. Meanwhile, a wealthy 65-year-old executive named Jack is mugged while traveling aimlessly through South America, neither the first nor the last of his hardships. Jack abandoned his cushy, bloodless office lifestyle after his dying mother told him to “run and never look back,” words he continuously labors to unpack. Finally, Anne, an abused teenage girl in Tennessee, steals her father’s savings and .38 revolver and runs away from home, clobbering her brother upside the head with a cast-iron skillet when he tries to stop her. She connects with her friend Trot, and they join a community of train-hoppers. Co-written by Bill, the story reads like a pastiche of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the latter of which is name-dropped as “great” by multiple characters. Though occasionally hitting some beautiful imagery of the American heartland, Reedus falls victim to implausible dialogue—“Fabiola, you are reading me like a stock report,” Jack says—and overcooked language: “flesh the color of a high-dollar medium-roast coffee bean.” Frequently wordy summaries do little to develop the thinly sketched characters; we know nearly as much about them on Page 25 as on Page 250.

A curious fetishization of outsiders, outlaws, and the down-and-out.

Kirkus Reviews

Powerful.”

Edgar Award–winning author of Moon Lake Joe R. Lansdale

Brave, determined, and fast-paced.”

LeoEdit.com

Gritty, realistic, violent, fast-moving, and fun.”

Bookreporter

The stories of three characters in search of the meaning of life alternate and echo in this gritty tale…Reedus does a fine job narrating…You can almost smell the motor oil and hear the bikes and trains rumble as the three follow their separate ways.”

Booklist (audio review)

A wild, gritty, propulsive work of fiction…You’ll take the ride of your life with Reedus’s fierce and unforgettable characters.”

#1 New York Times bestselling author of The Chain Adrian McKinty

The Ravaged is a wild ride through the underbelly of America following three characters who are running for their lives and running into trouble. This bold foray into the classic road novel genre has plenty of ass-kicking and bloody knuckles, but ultimately Reedus is always aiming for the heart-muscle, and many readers will appreciate the deeply felt introspection and cathartic moments rendered here. Norman Reedus cannonballs the ‘Grit-Lit’ world with this audacious, rollicking debut novel.”

internationally bestselling author of Oleander Cit Matt Bondurant

A bruising road poem which sings of a desperate plea for liberation from the shackles that bind, the stranglehold of familial disappointment and trauma. The need for freedom, tribe, relief from the ghosts that haunt, both living and dead. The Ravaged is a beautifully rendered work which gives voice to the hope that something better might be in reach just beyond the next bend in the road. I couldn’t put it down.”

Lydia Lunch

[A] deeply atmospheric debut…with strong character development and emotionally driven plots…[Reedus] conjures hot, twisting highways, cold steel railroad tracks, and the dry heat of the Atacama Desert, creating settings with such a strong sense of place that they become characters themselves.”

Booklist