Over Your Dead Body

Over Your Dead Body is a 2016 horror novel by Dan Wells published by Tor Books. It is the fifth book of six in Wells's John Cleaver series. Set a year after the conclusion of The Devil's Only Friend, the book continues the story of sociopathic teenage protagonist John Wayne Cleaver and his best friend Brooke as they drift around the Midwestern U.S. in search of a network of supernatural killers called "the Withered." Brooke suffers from dissociative identity disorder after surviving demonic possession, and her alternate personalities are key to discovering the other demons. The majority of critics approved of this fifth addition to the series, and the book won the 2016 AML Award for Best Novel. It is followed by the sixth and final novel in the John Cleaver series, Nothing Left to Lose. Development For this fifth installment of John's story, Wells continued the character's second arc of learning how to cope with his emotions after discovering them in the first trilogy. He told Deseret News in 2016 that Over Your Dead Body was his most challenging writing experience yet because of the "aimless" feeling he wanted the story of John and Brooke on the road to have. Wells said that writing a "wandering story without the book itself feeling directionless proved even harder, far harder than [he] had expected it to be." He wanted the novel to "take John in a completely new direction again" after the events of The Devil's Only Friend. He also cited Brooke's character as "especially tricky to get right." Plot summary John and Brooke are now on their own: hungry, dirty, and hunting down the "Withered" (demons in human form) using Brooke's memories from when she was possessed. They rely on stashes of supplies and money that Agent Potash, one of John's FBI team members, had stored before his death. Wanted by the FBI, the pair have been hitchhiking to different cities and towns for a year. They find a commune where the demon Yashodh is the leader, and John kills him quickly with a gun. They then move on to their next destination – the small town of Dillon, Oklahoma – and when they arrive, a new personality manifests itself through Brooke: Marci, John's former girlfriend who was killed by the demon Nobody. This proves to be extremely difficult for him; he is able to talk to the dead girl he loves, but she is trapped in Brooke's body and often gets replaced by the other personalities.