explore the library
Enter a world of devotion, darkness, and desire
A novel in progress
Marrowed Things
A creation made of beasts and bone, chained to one soul through the slow collapse of centuries. He is built to live forever; with every rebirth, she dies before she ever learns his name.
The Thing was not born, but assembled, bound to a grotesque body that cannot age and a memory that cannot forget. He is careful with the world, as though it bruises easily, and the world responds with torches raised in search of his monstrous form. Centuries pass over him, denying him the mercy of death as lives are lived and lost around him. Every life is eventually swallowed by memory, except one.
Bound to him at his creation, she becomes the marrow of his existence. She moves through him like breath and blood, until her death drains him hollow. Without her, his endless life becomes a slower death, until, in time, she returns to him in another body.
Across her many lives, she is given back to him in fragments, death reclaiming her too soon after each brief encounter. His devotion desperate and unfinished, he carries the accumulation of her lives, while her memory of him slips away with each severance. Three hundred years after his creation, she appears again in a coastal town of mid-nineteenth-century New England, steeped in fog and decay.
This time, she is not taken.
Eliza is born into a world of privilege sharpened into cruelty, where perfection is demanded, obedience is enforced, and women are conditioned to endure it with gratitude. Vivid, untamed, and alive, her ferocity tears through the careful order of her world when she encounters a creature who finally recognizes her hunger. Centuries of loss and longing break open between them, violent in their release, separation reclaimed by mutual obliteration. Consumed by an attachment marrow-deep, what remains cannot survive their closeness without consequence.
A novel in progress
If You See Them Smiling
A creature that wears a human smile, animated by parasitic mimicry and hollowed by hunger. To a solitary man, instinct is mistaken for intimacy, and imitation passes for humanity where nothing is alive.
Bodies vanish and answers rarely follow in the Louisiana bayou. Beneath the swamp, thick with rot and heat, lurks a creature that pulls its mouth into a human smile, its jaw opening and closing in practiced ways to mimic the voices of its prey. Their shapes appear human enough until closeness collapses the illusion, revealing a body corrupted by water and rot, its sinuous form no longer meant for land. What moves beneath its skin is an infestation of parasitic life, wearing a stolen body with nothing living at its center. In place of what was once human, it performs humanity with enough precision to invite trust from someone who recognizes intensity as intimacy. What it cannot feel, it has learned to imitate, and what it imitates, he believes.
Émile moves softly through his days without urgency or direction. His life has narrowed to slow routines and long silences following the burial of his wife in the early years of the twentieth century. Where purpose has fallen away, feeling remains, tender, earnest, and alone, though his gentleness does not soften what presses beneath it. An intense, desperate, and unclaimed hunger with no mouth to feed. When he encounters a strange woman in the heart of the bayou who reflects his loneliness back to him, he believes he has been fed.
His unanswered need finally recognized, he gives himself without restraint.
Her imitations disrupted by his intensity, her attention binds to him by instinct.
As she closes in, he empties himself willingly, letting her take him apart in the name of devotion until being consumed becomes survival itself. He feeds himself to her piece by piece, and as he withers, her eating grows intimate, appetite made affection. Their shared hunger begins to feel dangerously like love answering love, as though something inside her might be learning to be real.