Lest you fail to detect the skeleton of historical fact that gives shape to Daniel Kraus's unsettling, baroque, and surpassingly lurid new young adult novel, Rotters, I begin this review with a short history of the resurrection men, vulgarly referred to as grave robbers or body snatchers.

Maybe it's just that I'm a sucker for Cain's fast, lean, hit-the-ground-running story-telling -- talk as straight and sharp as a machete blade and twice as likely to leave you sore, since Noir heroes never end well--but it's also that the Noir hero sees so much, narrates and describes what he sees so meticulously, and yet fails to see the destruction that awaits him. This blindness is the mark of Oedipus, the original tragic hero and the Noir hero's earliest ancestor.