Five Funerals: Choose Your Own Perilous Path

by Jeff Somers, Ruth Ann Sellars (Illustrator)

Jeff Somers, author of popular noir thriller The Electric Church, kicks the door in on the darkly whimsical and macabrely weird with Five Choose Your Own Perilous Path— a book that looks at the tongue-in-cheek nihilism of Edward Gorey's The Gashlycrumb Tinies and asks, "What if these kids had a bit more life in them?" What emerges is a book you never knew you wanted to read but won't want to put down.
The graduating class of Bishop Carlbus Prep has a secret.
The Outing Party is a tradition at Bishop Carlbus, a semi-illicit party hosted by a senior student after the annual Outing, a weekend field trip taken by the graduating class every year. In 1995, Amy Keaton is determined to host a legendary Outing Party, but everything goes wrong. Her classmates are rude. Someone seems to be sabotaging her plans. And, as the night goes on, resentment and rage start driving everyone to extremes. The party spins out of by the next morning, Amy Keaton is dead, and twenty-five kids have a soul-crushing secret.
In 2015, six Bishop Carlbus Prep alumni-Victor, Kate, Leo, Titus, Ida, and Winnie-gather for the funeral of their old high school classmate Zillah. They soon realize that they are now the sole surviving members of the Class of 1995-everyone else who attended Amy Keaton's Outing Party is dead. And many of those deaths are bizarre and shocking. Sucked dry by leeches. Consumed by mice. Swept out to sea.
The survivors begin piecing together the events of the last two decades, and Is someone hunting them? Are they next?
And, maybe, do they deserve to be next?

482 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 22, 2026

About the author

Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) began writing by court order as an attempt to steer his creative impulses away from engineering genetic grotesqueries. He has published nine novels, including the Avery Cates Series of noir-science fiction novels from Orbit Books (www.avery-cates.com) and the Ustari Cycle series of urban fantasy novels. His short story “Ringing the Changes” was selected for inclusion in Best American Mystery Stories 2006, his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight edited by Charlaine Harris, and his story “Three Cups of Tea” appeared in the anthology Hanzai Japan. He also writes about books for Barnes and Noble and About.com and about the craft of writing for Writer’s Digest, which will publish his book on the craft of writing Writing Without Rules in 2018. He lives in Hoboken with his wife, The Duchess, and their cats. He considers pants to always be optional.