In writing Death of Heaven (2024 NYC Big Book Award for Horror), I wasn’t seeking to simply tell a horror story — I was trying to illuminate something deeper, more universal. This novel walks a knife-edge between the deeply personal and the disturbingly cosmic, between lyrical introspection and the brutal realities of madness, violence, and transformation. It’s a story rooted in terror, yes — but also in beauty, memory, and the fragile thread that ties us to meaning.
Andrew - Cover for Audiobook
The prose itself mirrors this tension. Rather than relying solely on plot or shock, Death of Heaven invites the reader into an atmosphere — a psychological landscape where dread lingers like fog and revelation arrives not with clarity, but with a kind of haunted grace.
One passage captures this tone clearly: a character, wrapped in uncertainty and fear, quietly contemplates whether a particular place might be “a good place to die.” It’s not a melodramatic moment. It’s quiet. Still. And in that stillness, the richness of the world presses in — the textures of the scene made more vivid by the weight of the question. That’s where the novel lives: in the collision between the horror of the question and the beauty of the world that dares to exist anyway.
This juxtaposition — despair and transcendence — recurs throughout the novel. My characters don’t simply face danger; they engage with it on a soul-deep level. They wrestle with questions of identity, mortality, memory, and fate. The horror is never just external — it’s mirrored in the psyche, in the ghosts of trauma, in the invisible architecture of guilt and belief.
Consider the line: “A dark character rode my mind, I knew that. A dark rider who made no compromise and rode in ways both surreal and inexplicable.” That’s not just a metaphor — it’s a lived experience for the character, and a reflection of something we all understand: the internalized presence of something we can’t always name, but that shapes our actions, our fears, our dreams.
And yet, for all its weight, there’s also absurdity. Life, even in its most grotesque moments, has a strange and terrible irony. The randomness of survival. The strangeness of fate. The tragic comedy of being alive while others fall. These elements find their way into the prose — not as relief, but as perspective. A way to acknowledge that the world is both more beautiful and more indifferent than we’d like to believe.
Death of Heaven is not an easy story. It wasn’t meant to be. But in its pages, I hope readers will find something they recognize — not just in the characters, but in the spaces between the words. In the quiet dread. In the sharp beauty. In the feeling that something just out of reach is watching, whispering, waiting.
That’s the line this book walks. And maybe, in some way, that’s the line we all walk.
Literary Echoes: Authors Who Walk Similar Lines
Authors who successfully navigate a nuanced balance between darkness and beauty, akin to what I aimed for in Death of Heaven, include both contemporary and classic figures known for exploring existential themes, surrealism, and macabre insight.
Jeff Lindsay, for example, creates in the Dexter series a compelling dance between violent urges and internal ethics. His character Dexter Morgan reflects deeply on the nature of good and evil — often with a voice both introspective and darkly amused. That moral tension, laced with unease and even humor, echoes the atmospheric duality I pursue: unsettling, yet strangely human.
Margaret Atwood, particularly in The Handmaid’s Tale, captures dystopia with a tone of ironic resilience. Her characters, even in the bleakest scenarios, find subtle acts of defiance and insight. I find resonance in how she frames oppression and madness without losing a thread of philosophical reflection — a quality I strive to capture in my own depictions of internal collapse and existential tension.
Haruki Murakami drapes his surreal narratives in existential mist. Novels like Kafka on the Shore blur the boundaries of reality and thought, offering philosophical weight under dreamlike logic. His ability to marry quiet beauty with grotesque imagery inspires a similar balance in my writing — one where the reader feels both untethered and introspective.
Neil Gaiman, in works like American Gods, layers myth onto modernity. His characters inhabit fantastical realities grounded in very human confusion — belief, purpose, and self-identity. In Death of Heaven, I also strive to explore the sacred and profane, often through surreal or seemingly mythic frameworks, filtered through very real emotions.
Flannery O’Connor’s Southern Gothic tales are studies in contradiction. Her dark humor undercuts the grotesque, and her characters’ suffering is interwoven with themes of grace, sin, and redemption. Her influence is felt in how I frame moments of horror not as ends in themselves, but as revelations — uncomfortable, absurd, yet meaningful.
Lessons From the Literary Shadows
From these authors, I draw several inspirations and affirmations:
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Intricate Characterization: Like Lindsay and O'Connor, I seek to build characters who hold contradictions — haunted, hopeful, brutal, and tender — so that their struggles echo our own.
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Balance of Tones: Inspired by Murakami and Gaiman, I allow beauty and terror to coexist, letting dark situations reveal strange wonders, and gentle moments carry unsettling truths.
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Philosophical Depth: As with Atwood, I believe horror and reflection must walk hand in hand — not to deliver answers, but to provoke better questions.
Death of Heaven is my own contribution to this lineage of unsettling yet reflective storytelling — a place where the abyss stares back, but where the sky, too, can open with light.
From Andrew to Death of Heaven: The Evolution of a Cosmic Struggle
Before Death of Heaven, there was Andrew (audiobook) — a novella born from a simple but haunting premise: a child burdened by trauma, navigating a world that refuses to see the depth of his inner reality. Andrew explores the profound isolation of a boy whose emotional and intellectual complexity is invisible to those around him. The story’s heart lies in his yearning for recognition, identity, and meaning — not just from others, but from the universe itself.
The audiobook is read by AI. I chose AI narration for this audiobook as an experiment in emerging technology. I wanted to explore how far voice synthesis has come—and the result? Surprisingly immersive and emotionally resonant. While it’s not a substitute for a seasoned voice actor, it brings a clean, consistent performance that lets the story shine without distraction. I do prefer live actors and have used them for my various projects. This was an interesting test of the product itself—specifically to gauge how readers and listeners would respond to an AI-narrated audiobook in terms of quality, accessibility, and engagement. It's been interesting.
That intimate struggle for self-understanding becomes the foundation for the broader existential crisis in Death of Heaven. While Andrew grapples with confusion and emotional fragmentation on a personal level, Death of Heaven scales those questions to a cosmic plane. The same themes — identity, perception, transformation, and the tension between the visible and unseen — reappear, but now through characters confronting not only their own trauma, but the unraveling of reality itself.
In Death of Heaven, the central tenet expands: it becomes the struggle between existential forces and the search for meaning amid chaos. Characters tied to the enigmatic Tiny Colony and SoulHeart initiative face overwhelming darkness — from within and beyond. The looming force of The Shade symbolizes a cosmic erasure, threatening not just lives, but the very meaning of existence. And yet, much like Andrew, these characters persist in their need to be known, to reclaim identity, and to hold onto a sense of unity despite fragmentation.
Together, Andrew and Death of Heaven form a philosophical continuum. Andrew is the seed — raw, personal, and intimate. Death of Heaven is the full bloom — vast, mythic, and world-shaking. Yet both ask the same question in different voices: Who are we when the world no longer reflects us?
And both suggest the same answer — that recognition, understanding, and the stubborn flicker of hope are not luxuries of peace, but necessities for surviving the dark.
In the end, Death of Heaven isn’t just a descent into darkness — it’s a search for meaning within it. I’ve never been interested in tidy resolutions. What moves me — and what moves the characters in both stories — are the honest confrontations. What does it mean to survive? To remember? To carry beauty through ruin?
These are the questions my characters face, and perhaps the ones we all do. If you find yourself drawn to stories that don’t flinch from the void but still manage to find a flicker of light within it — then maybe you’ve already walked part of the path this book follows.
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