***As a special thank you for ordering from my webstore, I am including the audio commentary into your order free of charge.***

Do you love dark drama? 

Are you into Lovecraftian myths? 

Do you get excited for LGBTQIA+ friendly romance? 

Then The Void Calls Us Home is perfect for you. 

Rebecca never thought she was suicidal. However, that didn’t stop her from jerking her car off the side of the road last night.

Everybody thinks she swerved to hit a deer, but she knows the truth. She did it because a giant flaming being called from the void and beckoned to her to join it in the darkness.

Was it a manifestation of her unconscious desire to die? Could the being really exist? Did it have anything to do with her sister’s suicide just a year before?

When Rebecca starts seeing the creature every time she closes her eyes, she has no choice but to find out the truth before it drives her mad.

If you like H.P. Lovecraft, psychological horror, coming of age stories, or deep explorations of grief, loss, death, and junk, then you'll love this world.

What's so special about this book?

I've written a lot of books, and while I love them all, some stand out among the rest. The Void Calls Us Home is special for a couple of reasons. 

I have been talking about the Void that tugged on my sanity in my own life since I started doing shows. Often, when it was slow, I would stare off into space and when people asked what I was doing, I would say "Talking to the Void."

My own personal Void has been a huge part of me for literally decades, and being able to openly talk about it is incredibly liberating.

It's also a book about suicide and depression, which is a topic very important to me. If you have followed my career, you probably know that I have been on meds for depression and anxiety for a long time, and when they are off I hear voices telling me to kill myself, and this book takes on all of that head-on, by personifying those voices as a cosmic force calling you toward it. 

Finally, it's the first book where I finished it and thought, "oh, I know what I'm doing". I had written close to 20 novels by that point, and this book was the first when I knew I had something special to say. 

Another thing that makes it special is that this was the second to last book I wrote before starting The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and this book was when a lot of the final elements of those stories clicked into place, so it will always be special to me because of how important that series is to me. 

Specifically, I always knew that Chelle and Rose would-be lovers, and that it would be a big ole gay love story, but except for a few dalliances with romance in The Godsverse Chronicles, I had never written a sapphic love story, or many love stories at all. 

I wouldn't call this a romance because...well, I won't spoil it, but things happen inside the book that point it away from romance and toward horror and dark fantasy. 

Sapphic love stories have become a staple of what I write, but this was the first time I turned hard into that part of my writing. Both the book and audio drama are hella gay. If you aren't okay with that, you won't like any of my work really, as with few exceptions all the main characters in my book are LGBTQIA+. 

That said, it's very much a Lovecraftian horror tale set in modern times, and the audio drama specifically turns hard into the horror while the book is more a YA dark fantasy, but they work great together. 

Why audio? 

I come from a world of film and television. I've been making movies since 2005, and so audio felt like a return to my roots. 

Fans of my work have asked me for audiobooks for years, but they are very expensive so I decided to try my hand at an audio drama to see if it was something I enjoyed, and that I could replicate. 

More importantly, I wanted a test case to see if audio is something I should be producing in the future. 

I chose The Void Calls Us Home because it was an intimate story with beautiful prose that I thought could be told by a single person, Award Winning actor Carolyn Jania, who brought the book so much soul and vibrance.  It's a small, intimate story that I thought I could do justice to on a tight budget. 

I basically cut a 60,000-word book down to about 20,000 words for Carolyn to act, and it's written as if she's talking into a tape recorder the whole time, much like Alice Isn't Dead, which is the closest thing to inspiration I had for this series. 

You'll be able to read the script in its entirety in the special edition ebook and hardcover of the story. 

I'm super proud of the audio quality of the series, and how it turned out. I listen to hundreds of hours of podcasts a month, and I think this is every bit as good as anything I listen to. I hope you'll listen to the first episode at the top of this page, though, and judge for yourself. 

Please note, though, that the audio drama really leans into the horror of the book, and less on the romance and humor, which were heavily featured in the novel.

Different formats, WILDLY different experiences

When I went to do my first audio project, I didn't want to make an audiobook, because I don't read audiobooks. Nothing against audiobooks. They just aren't my favorite thing.

What I do listen to is a lot of podcasts, especially actual play DnD podcasts and audio dramas. 

I LOVE them so much, and I thought if I was going to create something in a brand new medium, it should be something that I knew really well and innately loved. 

This audio drama is roughly two and a half hours long and takes its main inspiration from Night Vale presents Alice Isn't There. It's a really creepy and weird tale about a woman searching for her wife through the ins and outs of a twisted America most people don't see and recording it in her audio recorder to play back for her wife when she finds her. 

In the same way, Rebecca is given a tape recorder after her brush with death and spends the whole story recording her thoughts into a tape recorder, which forms the basis for the narrative. 

Because we've cut out all the other characters leaving only Rebecca, it's a much more intimate story that follows her down the rabbit hole as she spirals into obsession. 

I spent weeks going through and laying down sound effects, audio tracks, and creating an immersive and compelling experience that is wholly its own thing. 

The coolest thing about the Void Calls Us Home audio drama is that even though the bones of the story are the same, it's a completely different experience than reading the book.

We completely pulled apart the book, condensed it to its core, and stitched it back together again in an experience I think is haunting, chilling, and completely unique. 

***PLUS, GET THE AUDIO COMMENTARY WHEN YOU BUY FROM MY WEB STORE :) ***

WHY I LOVE IT:

1. I had been writing a long series for a while, and this book was my first chance to really do something wild that I hadn't in a long time. It felt great to get back to the more character-driven stories that I started writing over a decade ago.
2. This was my first chance to really process my father's death, and honestly, my own mortality. After his death, I basically wrote for a year straight without a break, and this was my first chance to take a break and process it.
3. Rebecca is one of my all-time favorite characters. She has a very Delilah energy. I definitely have a type.

SAMPLE:

Chapter 1

I have never been suicidal.

Sure, I’ve had dark thoughts in my life, but who hasn’t? They were never more than just a passing thought that swooped into my mind and left as quickly as they came. I was a relatively happy human female, all things considered, and yet…

I think I tried to kill myself last night. I hate using the word “think”. I mean, if I tried to kill myself, that’s the kind of thing I should know, right?

It is, but that didn’t change the fact I just wasn’t sure.

God, that sounded so moronic. Even stupider than it sounded rattling around in my brain. It’s just that, one moment, I was driving along, minding my own business. And then, I was off the side of the road, plummeting down an embankment, and slamming into a tree. The rest of the car ride I remembered vividly, but that last moment...

The reason that I jerked the wheel to the right on that lonely, dark, mountain road…that’s what was fuzzy.

I remembered singing along to Kesha’s “Rainbow”, where she goes, “I’ve found a rainbow, rainbow, baby Trust me, I know, life is scary, but just put those colors on, girl. Come and play along with me tonight…”  Suddenly the temperature in my car plummeted. The hair on my arms stood up on end and I felt as if my insides were being hollowed out, as if every good thought in my body had been stripped away from me.

 I stopped singing. I stopped everything and stared blankly out into the dark night. It was rainy, and the thick drops fell onto my windshield. The wipers whipped across the glass as they struggled to keep the water at bay. I should have replaced them months ago, but it always slipped my mind.

The music must have still been on right before the car jerked to the right, but I couldn’t hear it anymore. All I heard was the rhythmic wiping of the windshield as I peered out into the dark beyond my headlights. The darkness hypnotized me. Hopelessness washed over me, utter hopelessness; despair that felt eternal.

Then, I spun my wheel to the right…

…and I fell…

When my head slammed into the steering wheel, the darkness engulfed me. I drifted through the nothing like some dark, underwater pit, except that I wasn’t drowning. I wasn’t gasping for breath. I wasn’t even frightened. I was one with the black. Without hope, fear, or happiness. I just…was.

I heard the muffled sounds of the medics prying me from the car, and later the voices of doctors as they worked to save my life, but I couldn’t see them. I couldn’t feel them. I was numb, completely and utterly without feeling, left with nothing but the frigid cold. 

I don’t know how long I floated in the emptiness. I swam in every direction, looking for a flicker of warmth that eluded me. I longed for comfort, for heat, for answers, but no matter how far I travelled, there was nothing around me. I screamed into the abyss, but there was nobody there.

Without warning, a great force jerked me by the throat and pulled me out of the darkness. I woke up gasping for breath. My eyes fluttered opened, and I sucked in oxygen as if I had come back from drowning.

Nurses and doctors flooded into the room as I spasmed uncontrollably on the bed, kicking off the fresh linens. A needle jabbed in my arm, and then, it was quiet again. This time, I did not fall into the hopeless void, but into a pleasant dream, where I was a pony.

The second time I woke, my eyes focused on my mother. She looked as though she hadn’t slept in days. Her short, blonde hair was tangled, and her face was greasy. Dark circles rested under her eyes. I hadn’t seen her without make-up once in my entire life, and the sight was enough to jar me awake.

“Mom?” I asked, weakly. I tried to push myself to my elbows, but the pain in my chest burned and I collapsed back onto the hospital bed like a ten-ton rock.

 “Becca!” Mom said, her voice cracking with excitement. “Becca! You’re awake!”

She jumped up and wrapped her arms around my neck. She pressed herself closely and my chest throbbed again.

“Ow,” I said to her. My mother was not an emotional person by any stretch of the imagination. I couldn’t remember her ever hugging me like that, and yet she held me so tight I thought I would burst.

“Sorry,” Mom said, pushing herself back and wiping the tears from her eyes. “I didn’t know if I would ever see you again.”

“It’s okay,” I said, taking a deep heave of air. Every breath was agony, but I couldn’t stop taking long inhales and exhales, enjoying my breath in a way I never had before. “How long have I been…how long have I been out?”

“Four weeks,” she replied. “They told me you would never wake up, but I knew. I just knew that you would. I…knew.”

Mom swallowed her sadness as the tears came again. Mom hadn’t even cried at my sister’s funeral, and yet here she was, sobbing at my bedside. She tried to talk but it was no use. All that eked out where mumbled syllables that I couldn’t understand. She collapsed back onto the chair and wept into her hands.

 “You’re up!” I heard from the doorway.

I turned my aching head to see my father standing at the door with two cups of coffee. He was a big man, and broad. He could have played linebacker in the NFL with his massive size, except that he had the coordination of a running camel.

“Hi, Dad,” I replied, groggy. “Ignore Mom. She’s having a moment.”

Dad smiled at me. “She’s emotional, kiddo.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t know what to do. This is a foreign experience to me.”

“Just give her a minute.” 

He barreled forward to give me a hug, but I held out my hand to stop him. My arms throbbed as they swung above my body.

“Please, no,” I said. “I don’t think my body can take one of your bear hugs right now.”

He shrugged, disappointed but understanding. My father was not emotionally stilted like my mother. He was responsible for most of the affection I received in my life. My sister accounted for the rest, but…

“I get it,” he said, holding up his hand. “I’m just, oh, I’m really glad to see you, is all.” He leaned forward to place a gentle kiss on my forehead.

My vision swirled and crackled, and my eyes turned up into my head. I tried to keep my head up, but it was no use. I collapsed back in bed and drifted off, hoping I would dream of kittens and not the black nothingness I had been trapped in for so long.