Habitat - by Case Q Kerns (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Habitat invites us to witness a near-future dystopia filled with cloned animals, a sponsorship-based education system, and a subculture obsessed with body transplants as performance art--concluding 100 years in the future with a girl's post-apocalyptic quest to find her father.

In this novel told through linked narratives, a father embraces a grisly family tradition to help secure a better education for his daughter after a neighborhood barbecue. A young man crashes his family's meticulously planned annual gala to unveil his latest surgical transplant. Parents try to find a way to give their daughter the year's most sought-after Christmas gift--a clone of the canine star of a sci-fi television show.

Combining body horror, science fiction, and poignant family drama, Habitat is a genre-bending and wholly original first novel.

Review Quotes

"Fans of T.C. Boyle and Karen Russell, rejoice! Case Q. Kerns' Habitat is home to nine clever stories that refract our world into something both strange and all-too-familiar. Two parts fable and one-part warning, Kerns' writing endeavors to show us who we are and what we might, in the not-too-distant future, become. A brilliant achievement." --Nick White, author of How to Survive a Summer

"Kerns has conjured an all too possible epic dystopia beginning with bio-tech capitalism run amok and spiraling toward an inevitable post-apocalyptic landscape. From a patchwork boy of transplanted body parts and the genetic copies of celebrity pets to an end of the world bunker experiment that sets the stage for far future chaos, Habitat is an incisive, genre-bending, and thrilling work that holds a lens to how corporate bottom lines both offer near-term bandages while also setting us up for our potential destruction. A fantastic tapestry of a dystopian world that I couldn't put down." --Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark

"A prisoner is roped into a mysterious donation program. A heist is undone by a shocking attack. A man's lonely existence in a post-apocalyptic bunker is not at all what it appears to be. Habitat draws us into landscapes ripe with peril and wonder, where reality can turn on a dime. Case Q. Kerns writes with fierce precision about the possibilities that might await us in future worlds both near and far. This is a remarkable, deeply original debut." --Laura van den Berg, author of State of Paradise

About the Author

Case Q. Kerns is the author of Habitat (Black Lawrence Press, 2025), a novel of interconnected narratives beginning in a near future New England and ending a century later. Originally from Buffalo, NY, he received a BS in Cinema & Photography from Ithaca College and an MFA from Emerson College where he served as fiction editor for the literary journal Redivider. His work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Harvard Review, and West Branch. He lives in Medford, Massachusetts with his family.