The Crimson Side

Denny is forty-five years old, freshly divorced, and moving back into his childhood bedroom with three unsold novels, a guitar he can't finish playing, and a career as a jail control room operator he just quietly walked away from. Nineteen years of writing into the dark. Two and a half years since he finished a single true sentence. He tells himself the silence is temporary. He has told himself that before.

Then, on a night in his mother's backyard, something pulls him east — toward nothing he can name, toward hills he's looked at a thousand times without ever once wanting to walk toward them. He stands under a blood moon three weeks later and says the truest sentence he's spoken in months, out loud, to no one: I want to matter to somebody again.

Three weeks after that, his car turns itself down a street he's never driven, toward a strip-mall art studio he's passed a dozen times without seeing. Inside are two women — Ara, red-haired and fearless, quoting Stephen King like scripture; Serenity, quiet and exact, the first person in years to tell him he's good at something and mean it — who pull him back into his own unfinished life one Tuesday photography class at a time. For the first time since the divorce, Denny finishes something: a song he'd abandoned in February, a sentence he'd deleted a dozen times, a version of himself he thought the marriage had used up.

Then he meets Helena.

She hosts game nights out of a house in Highland that somehow always has room for one more. She listens like his words are the only thing worth hearing in the room. She says, within the first thirty seconds of meeting him, exactly what he needed someone to say — and something about the precision of it, the perfect-pitch calibration of her warmth, will keep circling back to him long after the night is over, the way a wish, once made under the right sky, has a way of finding exactly the shape it needs to answer itself.

The Crimson Side is a literary paranormal horror novel about creative resurrection and the particular danger of getting exactly what you asked for — about a man who spent two and a half years unable to write a single sentence, who finally finds his voice again in a strip-mall studio and a stranger's living room, without yet understanding that some doors, once wished open, were never meant to close.

For readers of Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, and anyone who has ever wished for rescue and wondered, afterward, what exactly it was that came.