books

Status: On Submission

Genre: upper YA horror

Deep within Voss Woods, humans can gamble pieces of their souls for a chance at immortality. The winners reap the losers’ souls to use them however they wish–to elongate their own life, or to resurrect another’s. No one knows this better than Harris Lightfield, the moody town’s dark enigma.

17-year-old twin sisters Adella and Lamisse Haddad know only of the Voss’ insidious rumors–at least, as far as Adella can tell. Lamisse is secretly familiar with the dark presence in Voss, ever since her closest friend went missing in the Woods two years ago, and she and Harris are the sole witnesses who later stumbled upon his mutilated body.

His death was Lamisse’s fault.

When Lamisse’s guilt lures her to accept her ex-best friend’s Harris’ invitation to Voss Woods to try resurrect her friend, Harris betrays her trust and stakes her life against her will. And when Adella steps in to save Lamisse from the deadly fallout of Harris’ gamble, Voss Woods gives her seven days to save Lamisse, or forfeit the game and lose her to Voss’ unstable dark magic.


Status: Drafting

Genre: Crossover Kafkaesque horror. Retelling of Franz Kafka’s THE TRIAL.

Alt-Prague, 1914. Ottla Dvořáková is a shadow. A runaway with a haunted past and a law student, she’s cultivated a life in careful ordinariness. You must be invisible, for the Law has eyes. In walls, between bookshelves, sowed in neighbors’ heads. Everywhere.

One night, a bleeding figure with Ottla’s face breaks into her apartment, pleading for asylum. They’re a defendant in a secret trial lasting years, they say. Only now has the Law—an omniscient quasi-authority with eyes and eyes and eyes—let them go. But the Law is moody, and it could revoke their freedom, if it wishes.

The next day, Ottla is inexplicably arrested. For no crime, put behind no bars. Yet left to roam “free,” bound only by paranoia of constant surveillance, she’s on trial, like not-Ottla was. Thrust into a maze-like bureaucratic world that makes no sense, Ottla strikes a deal with her guards: she’ll find, frame, and kill the person that ruined her life—not-Ottla—in exchange for her freedom.

But how can Ottla hunt a person that doesn’t exist for a malicious, unseen authority that isn’t real when reality itself warps with her every move?