Chicken House Press Signs Award-Winning Massachusetts Author for Bold New YA Series
Fresh off the success of his multi-award-winning CHP debut, Red Brick Road — which earned the 2024 International Impact Award and first place honours from The Book Fest — J. T. Maxwell is back, and Chicken House Press couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome him home for his next adventure.
15 is not what you expect. It is not dystopian fiction, exactly — though it is built on a world reshaped by catastrophe. It is not a coming-of-age story, exactly — though it is about what happens when adolescence arrives in a world completely unprepared for it. Instead, it is a deeply funny, deeply disturbing portrait of what happens when the first generation born into a crime-free paradise starts hitting puberty and discovers that darkness doesn’t need to be inherited; it can be generated fresh.
At its centre is a suburban teenage boy — funny, self-aware, and impossible to look away from — growing up in a world where human evil was assumed to have been permanently solved. Whether it was right about that is a question 15 is in no hurry to answer.
Those who love the literary provocation of Chuck Palahniuk, the brooding interiority of William Faulkner, and the slow-burn dread of early M. Night Shyamalan, will find something familiar here — but Maxwell delivers it in a cadence that is entirely, unmistakably his own. Voice-driven, contemporary, and crackling with irreverent wit, 15 stakes out territory that feels urgently new in the YA landscape. Maxwell writes the male teenage experience from the inside out — with all the chaos, digression, and alarming self-knowledge that entails — and the result is something the genre has been missing.
15 is Book One of The Cataclysm Series, following Tyler year by year — 15, 16, 17 — as the world he inherited continues to unravel. Planned for release in early 2027, the road ahead is long, and it is paved in intrigue, angst, and the occasional Pop-Tart.
J. T. Maxwell is an MBA and business teacher from Clinton, MA, where he lives with his wife of twenty-five years, two sons, and a pair of cats. He is an enthusiastic road-tripper, a dedicated homeowner of a Victorian-era property, an amateur brewer, and a man still searching for the world's best root beer float.
