Maria DeVivo is the author of Amazon bestselling and award winning series, The Coal Elf Chronicles. When not writing about dark fantasy or horror, she teaches Language Arts and Journalism to middle school students in Florida. A lover of all things dark and demented, Maria takes pleasure in warping the comfort-factor in her readers’ minds – just when you think you’ve reached a safe place, she snaps you back in to her twisted reality.
Website: www.mariadevivo.com
Facebook: www.facebook.com/mariadevivoauthor
Griffin King is an ordinary high school senior dealing with typical teenage issues - a bratty little sister, overbearing parents, an obnoxious best friend, and the unrequited love of his long-time crush. But when a virus suddenly infects a large portion of the population, Griffin soon finds himself on the opposite side of the proverbial horror story.
After months of roaming the broken landscape of the city as an infected person, a cure is found and a mass injection of antiserum is administered to the diseased, causing Griffin to become one of the ALTERED, a small group of ‘ex-infecteds’ who have been cured, but changed. Now he must learn how to start his life anew - suppressing his need to consume human flesh, and living among an angry post-apocalyptic society where race, gender, and religion don’t matter anymore. Welcome to the new world. A world where people like him – people altered like him – are the minority.
Two years after the closing of the Altered Re-Assimilation Centers across the United States, infected-turned-back-human Griffin King is trying to rejoin a vengeful society that is still rebuilding from the outbreak years before. While various forces align against the Altered, a new breed called the Ferals look to bring about a second wave of the virus with the help of a black market drug known as The Black Death.
Walking the lines between the humans and the Altered, and compelled to continue the work left behind by his former caretaker, Dr. Holston, Griffin is both helped and hindered by faces new and old. But in a fractured landscape on the verge of war, how can Griffin be sure who is friend and who is enemy?
This time, if he chooses poorly, he may not be so lucky.
After escaping their imprisonment from Plum Island, Griffin and Jarrod return to the mainland only to find that a second outbreak of the virus has ravaged the entire country. Only this time, something has changed. Help is not on the way. Their only chance of survival is to get back to Dr. Oswald in Florida, where a unique Altered child could hold the key to a cure for the Infected. Even if Griffin can find his way home, it may be too late to save mankind from its extinction event. This time, everyone’s luck may run out for good.