My latest is ADVERSE REACTIONS: A Novel of the Paranormal. Publication date 18 March 2026. It’s a post-apocalyptic paranormal Western, a suspense-thriller that’s also speculative historical fiction. To put it mildly, it crosses genres! Are you intrigued? My beta readers and ARC readers have been.
Gifted individuals in Purity face a stark choice between immediate death or the horrors of the Peaceful Hills sanatorium. Devin Perridin, the “One Who Got Away,” seeks to reclaim her psychokinetic powers and bring retribution, with the aid of a denim-clad desperado and a generous helping of Old Magic.
“This novel is immediately immersive, with an opening scene that sucks readers in with vivid sensory detail and a great sense of suspense.” —The Black List
“What a story! I was picked up from the first page and you never let me go thereafter. The premise is original … compelling … convincing.” —ARC Reader
“A very enjoyable read. Excellent pacing. Immersive language. Polished, effortless writing. I’d love to see a prequel (or three)!” —ARC Reader
“Relevant to the current situation in the world. Ostracizing others who are different out of fear and ignorance. Cruelty and inhumanity.” —ARC Reader
“Believable and relatable.” —The Black List
“Thematically rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast.” —The Black List
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Fable
More About the Book
When your mind makes you the enemy, either your mind must die, or you will. Unless yours is the mind they can’t break.
Since she was six years old, Devin Perridin has been locked behind the walls of the family home to keep her hidden from those who would kill her. But at sixteen, she is exposed as a “Syke,” one of an outlawed minority who possess extraordinary powers of mind over matter. Snatched from hiding, she escapes the firing squad, but only to be imprisoned in a house of horrors: the Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of Persistent Mental Disorders. After an unknown time of torture and “behavior modification,” brutally designed to destroy her psychokinetic reflexes, she emerges from the asylum severely damaged in mind and spirit. Her salvation may lie in the series of crimes triggered by her release: first kidnapping, then attempted murder, and then a mustering of forbidden forces to assault the remote pseudo-psychiatric facility where she had been tortured into near-mindlessness.
Drawing upon a strength she had always known was hers but had never before been able to consciously control, Devin defies the authoritarian society with its unjust laws that demand her death. She pushes through pain, isolation, and moral quandaries to seek justice for not only herself, but all members of a maligned and cruelly persecuted minority. A post-apocalyptic, paranormal allegory for the times in which we live.
To be gifted in a world that demands conformity is to wage a battle between an individual’s spirit and a crushing system. “Thematically rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast.” —The Black List
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Related blog posts:
A Bookish Striptease: Cover Reveal
ADVERSE REACTIONS: “Immediately immersive and thematically rich”
Keywords
- Suspense thriller
- Speculative fiction
- Apocalyptic
- Fantasy
- Action-adventure
- High-stakes supernatural thriller
- Dystopian paranormal thriller
- Quarantined asylum
- Speculative history
- Psychokinetic abilities
- Psychokinesis
- Gritty modern Western
- Post-apocalyptic paranormal thriller
- Possibly linked to the Waterspell universe, in a tangential way
