BloodLight

In a country that disappears its sick, revelation is the deadliest diagnosis.

Robert Goldner was five when his mother spilled her confession along with her wine: he was unwanted, unplanned, the ruin of her life. She was murdered on his eleventh birthday, leaving him grief, a killer never caught, and the suspicion that her cruelest sentence was also her truest.

At sixteen, he has built a life designed to disprove it. Top grades. A varsity singlet and the wrestlers' commandment—never go to your back. A first love kept secret and kept safe. And a private scripture in Psi-Kyll Soul, the impossible-to-classify band whose whispered refrain—alone, alive—steadies him better than any hymn.

Then Valentine's Eve rearranges the terms of belief.

A full moon wears seven concentric colors. Armed snowmen and snowwomen sway through a suburban backyard under a sign reading PARADISE LUST. Robert's best friend surfaces from the snow half-dressed, clothes torn away, no heavier than Styrofoam in his arms—then vanishes into a Heartland Security hospital whose patients come out dead or deemed "good and ready."

Soon the ordinary world begins shedding its skin. His girlfriend's empty clothes peel away from a skeleton of orange and indigo light. His fingers lengthen into blind worms in the middle of practice. Red specks glitter on unbroken flesh. A murder of crows falls on the field, black on a sea of white.

Hallucination, infection, haunting—or a conversion with no name and no consent. In a wounded America where his own perception is hostile evidence, Robert has to sort revelation from disease before somebody else's scripture finishes rewriting him. Body first.

BloodLight is dark metaphysical fantasy in which dread enters through the senses, scripture mutates under pressure, and a boy's oldest wound may be the door Creation uses.