MAKE SURE YOU DIE SCREAMING

PRESS REVIEWS FOR Make Sure You Die Screaming

''a book that feels incredibly of the moment''
- Ilana Masas, LA Times 

'Zee Carlstrom's exhilarating debut'
- Elle Magazine USA - Best Queer Books of 2025 

'The novel's DNA echoes: Burroughs in the fractured momentum and feverish language; Thompson in the pharmaceutical velocity and satirical rage; and something of Frazier's Cold Mountain in its damaged soul moving through a politically riven South, seeking something that may no longer exist... Make Sure You Die Screaming ultimately earns its fury. A queer novel about estrangement and grief that refuses sentimentality without abandoning love. A road novel about America that refuses optimism without abandoning forward motion. Carlstrom has written something mean and strange and necessary about the cost of surviving a family, a country, yourself, and still finding community on the other side of the wreckage'
- Scene Magazine  

'Carlstrom creates a youthful voice that swells with rancour at every kind of inequity (class most of all) and flirts with an almost nihilistic worldview. It's a novel sparked by the kind of modern political polarisation that divides families, Carlstrom is astute enough to suggest that parallels may be found at both poles, as this queer road trip careens from blue heartland to red.'
- Sydney Morning Herald