ADVERSE REACTIONS: A Novel of the Paranormal
In the remote prairie town of Purity, mental gifts earn you a bullet or a lingering death by mind-torture. Devin Perridin is the Syke who survived the horrors of the psych ward. Now the "One Who Got Away" is back for a reckoning. To mete out justice, Devin must reclaim her psychokinetic powers, aided by a denim-clad desperado and a generous helping of Old Magic.
Survival was just the beginning: vengeance is next.
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.
"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
"The pacing is tense and immersive, with a strong focus on psychological resilience and rebellion. It is a story of survival that steadily evolves into reckoning." —NewInBooks
Author's Note
Adverse Reactions, my newest standalone novel, is different from my Waterspell fantasy series. It is darker, grittier, and set in a post-apocalyptic world. But it has the same attention to character development and world building that my readers have come to expect. Venture with me, won't you, down this twisty dystopian path. If you loved The Power by Naomi Alderman or the atmosphere of a dark Western, you will enjoy Adverse Reactions.
Keywords
- Suspense thriller
- Speculative fiction
- Apocalyptic
- Dark fantasy
- Action-adventure
- High-stakes supernatural thriller
- Dystopian paranormal thriller
- Quarantined asylum
- Speculative history
- Psychokinetic abilities
- Psychokinesis
- Weird Western
- Post-apocalyptic paranormal thriller
- Women's adventure fiction
- Possibly linked to the Waterspell universe, in a tangential way