Grasshopper Jungle

Grasshopper Jungle is a young adult novel by the American writer Andrew Smith, published in 2014 and set in a small town in Iowa.

Austin is sixteen, and his life is complicated before anything apocalyptic happens: he loves his girlfriend Shann, he is also in love with his best friend Robby, and he is trying to record the whole business in a history of his own. What he and Robby have actually done is release something from a derelict factory, and the result is an army of six-foot praying mantises that are hungry and single-minded, and that multiply. The novel alternates between an account of the end of the world and an account of being a confused teenager inside it, and it is written as a history of both, in the voice of a boy who has decided that since this is the end of everything, the true version may as well be written down.

Smith writes about adolescent desire and catastrophe without separating them, and the book's comedy comes from how ordinary teenage concerns remain ordinary while the town is being overrun.