Fail Sons (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781641298636)

A pair of estranged brothers drive their father's cryonically frozen body across the country to its final resting place in a darkly comic 21st century update of As I Lay Dying.

When Scott Platt's brother, Nick, calls to ask him to fly to Arizona and retrieve their father's body from the Cryo Center where it's been frozen since the nineties, the timing couldn't be worse: He's forty, unemployed, and spiraling as he and his wife await the birth of their first child. Nick's as tightly wound as Scott is adrift, and the brothers have never gotten along. But the Cryo Center's shutting down, and they've got six days to haul their father's frozen body to a new facility in Massachusetts--without letting it thaw past -109 . And Scott needs to get back home to New York before his wife goes into labor.

It's the summer of 2022. The country's still reeling from the pandemic. And driving a corpse cross-country in a U-Haul through Red State America proves predictably chaotic. Nick insists on wearing a KN95 the entire time. They pass through deserts, mountains, and plains, encountering Aryan cops, ex-Mormon hitchhikers, a Gen Z commune, and MAGA-hat-wearing Walmart clerks. They play blackjack, take shrooms, and swim under the stars--all while trying to keep the body frozen and their relationship from melting down.

Fail Sons is a brilliant exploration of masculinity, grief, and the ways we carry the dead--and each other--across a divided America.

Author: Adam Wilson
ISBN-10: 1641298634
ISBN-13: 9781641298636
Publisher: Soho Press
Language: English
Published: 10/06/2026
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.25lbs