We’re happy to be hosting Jason Luthor’s FLOOR 21 blog tour today! Please leave a comment to let him know you stopped by!
About the Book:
The last of humanity
is trapped at the top of an isolated apartment tower with no memory of how they got there or why. All travel beneath Floor 21 is forbidden, and nobody can ever recall seeing the ground floor. Beneath Floor 21, a sickness known as the Creep infests that halls of the Tower. A biological mass that grows stronger in reaction to people’s fear and anger, the Creep prey’s on people by causing them to hallucinate until they’re in a state of panicking, before finally growing strong enough to lash out and consume them. Only a small team known as Scavengers are allowed to go beneath Floor 21 to pillage the lower levels in
search of food and supplies.
Jackie is a brilliant young girl that lives far above the infection and who rarely has to worry about facing any harm. However, her intense curiosity drives her to investigate the bottom floors and the Creep. To deal with her own anxiety and insecurities, she documents her experiences on a personal recorder as she explores the secrets of the Tower. During the course of her investigation,
Jackie will find herself at odds with Tower Authority, which safeguards what
remains of humanity, as she attempts to determine what created the Creep, how
humanity became trapped at the top of the Tower, and whether anyone knows if
escape is even possible.
For More
Information
- Floor 21 is available at Amazon.
- Discuss this book at PUYB
Virtual Book Club at Goodreads.
My love for books has always been in the thriller/horror genre and my love of reading has over time pushed me into many other categories such as this one, YA and Dystopia. I read the blurb for Floor 21 and was quite intrigued by it and had to see what Jason does with this story.
Floor 21 is written in a first narrative and I don’t think this story could have been told in any other way. We get to see things in recordings from Jackie and Vic. If this story was told any other way, it wouldn’t have that same urgency or unique mystery to it. Reading about the Tower and the Creep from their view points keeps this story strong moving at a great pace.
While I had some issues with Jackie and her personality, she’s young yet extremely intelligent, her mannerisms and the way she talked at times, didn’t always mesh with her suppose intelligence. I felt that Jason wrote some very interesting characters with different attributes. Although we don’t get to know these other characters very well, through the eyes of Jackie and Vic, we have a good understanding these characters.
Jason did a great job of keeping me on the edge of my seat. I enjoyed the mysteries of the Tower and the Creep and how things came to be. There are still quite a few outstanding questions and mysteries, which I am hoping in the next book we get answers to.
Overall, a great YA dystopia read. I highly recommend to others who enjoy this genre.
Book Excerpt
When you stop and think about it, I mean, our lives don’t make sense. We couldn’t have always lived up here, right? It gets me pretty antsy thinking about it because, I mean, this is a tower, so we had to have come up the stairs at some point.
Didn’t we?
I don’t know, and thinking about it gets me frustrated. When I’m in this kind of mood, I go to the rooftop and look out. You can actually see other towers rising up in the distance. Some aren’t even that far from ours. I stare at them, and I’m just like . . . is anybody over there? Is anybody looking back at me? Does anybody know or remember we’re trapped in this place?
Or are we all that’s left?
After I’ve gotten myself sufficiently depressed, I’ll stare over the edge of the roof, trying to see how far below I can look. Thing is, it’s impossible to see much. This tower just vanishes into the Darkness. Nobody, and I mean nobody, even knows why.
It’s just blackness down there.
Oh, about Floor 12. Yeah, that’s where the Creep really starts. The Creep? It’s
this . . . gunk. Super-disgusting stuff that you shouldn’t touch because it makes you feel weird, and the lower down the Tower you go, the more you see it. It starts to cover the walls, and it’s kinda gross. It’s really slick, like saliva, and it looks all muscle-y. Almost alive. Good thing you don’t have to worry about it when you’re higher than Floor 11. Still, I
wonder what it is. We all do. I know that when you touch it, you can start hallucinating.
I did once. Well, okay, I’m lying. I’ve touched it a few times when I’ve been
on the lower levels, which is why my parents made the rule that I couldn’t head down there in the first place. I mean, I don’t pay attention to them, but I get why they don’t want me going that far below into the Tower. The Creep makes you see . . . things. Shadowy things. Sometimes they’re right
in front of you, but most of the time, they’re in the corner of your eye. They
say that by Floor 21, you don’t even have to touch the Creep to hallucinate,
which is a total trip. Must suck to live down there.
About the Author
Jason Luthor has spent a long life writing for sports outlets, media companies and universities.
His earliest writing years came during his coverage of the San Antonio Spurs as
an affiliate with the Spurs Report and its media partner, WOAI Radio. He would
later enjoy a moderate relationship with Blizzard Entertainment, writing lore
and stories for potential use in future games. At the academic level he has
spent several years pursuing a PhD in American History at the University of Houston, with a special emphasis on Native American history.His inspirations include some of the obvious; The Lord of the Rings and
Chronciles of Narnia are some of the most cited fantasy series in history.
However, his favorite reads include the Earthsea Cycle, the Chronicles of
Prydain, as well as science fiction hits such as Starship Troopers and Do
Androids dream of Electric Sheep?
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