A visually stunning horror story, ghost story, and work of graphic literary fiction, this book tells a raw and disturbing story rooted in our human history, with a devastating and unforgettable ending.

"How can you see letters without wanting to read them? How can you look at the sea without wanting to swim in it?"

A young boy discovers that his father has been writing a secret book--a book that turns out to be a history of infanticide. Compelled by curiosity, the boy delves into the book, where he swims in the sea of his father's sloping handwriting.

Every night, he reads a fragment--pages that make him feel suffocated and unable to sleep. And every day he ponders whether children need know this horror story. But the boy's most pressing concern is something else: that history is catching-up with him as his father's book progresses through the ages. Will the story reach the present day and find him? Clearly, history repeats itself.

Highlighting how little we collectively know about the moments in history where infants have been exterminated, such as the time of the Roman Emperor Nero, the crusades against children, the massacre of the Holy Innocents, the Congress of Basel in 1437, Napoleon and the regiments of Marie Louise... right up to the child trafficking and domestic violence of today, Chávez Castañeda and Magallanes bring this history into focus to powerful and devastating effect. In doing so, they provoke us to think more honestly and deeply about childhood, children, and the respect we owe them in their difference from adults.

Written by genre-defying Mexican author Ricardo Chávez Castañeda, The Book of Denial is a dark and powerful story within a story, illustrated with a striking graphic sensibility by Alejandro Magallanes and translated by Lawrence Schimel.

This is the third book to appear under Unruly, an imprint of picture books for older readers, and will include a short note to readers about how it continues to build this experimental framework of visually complex, sophisticated picture books for teens and adults.