Monster: A Novel is out. I've been sitting with that sentence for a few days now, trying to figure out what to say about it.
Here's what I can tell you.
Where It Came From
The book started with a question I couldn't shake: what if the thing that follows you home isn't a monster in the traditional sense — not a creature, not a villain — but something older? Something that doesn't want to hurt you so much as it wants to complete something?
The labyrinth came first. I'd been reading about ancient stone structures, about the mythology of liminal spaces, about the idea that certain places exist outside of normal time. And then I thought: what if two people stumbled into one of those places by accident? What if they didn't know what they'd walked into until it was too late to walk back out?
Morrigan and Sean came next. I needed characters who felt real enough to carry that weight — people with ordinary problems, ordinary dreams, ordinary failures. The failed auditions. The coffee house shifts. The slow grind of a life that isn't quite what you imagined. That part wasn't hard to write.
The Kitten
I know. Everyone asks about the kitten.
The kitten was never supposed to be in the book. It showed up in a draft and refused to leave. That's the honest answer.
I wrote it out three times. It kept coming back. Eventually I stopped fighting it and started asking why it belonged there — and once I understood that, the whole third act clicked into place. Sometimes the story knows things you don't.
What It Cost
This one was harder to write than anything in the Phobias series. Science fiction gives you distance. You can put your fears into a microbe, into an AI, into a system — and examine them from a safe remove. Horror doesn't give you that. Horror puts the fear right in front of you and asks you to look at it directly.
I'm proud of this book. I'm also relieved it's out of my hands.
What's Next
I'm not ready to talk about the next project yet. But I'm writing. That's always the answer.
If you read Monster, I'd love to know what you thought. The contact page is open.