J. V.
Molenaar.

The Illuminated Cut: the author’s tightened edition. Rebuilt into nine chapters and sharpened throughout, this is the story told the way it was always meant to be.

He wakes before the light resolves, in a room with no door, no window, no memory of how he arrived.

The light falls too precisely across a wall that shouldn’t exist, with no visible source. When the room finally opens onto a corridor, it stretches without end in either direction. Doors appear and dissolve at intervals only it seems to understand. A calm, clinical voice instructs him to stabilize, to keep moving, to not look back.

He cannot remember his name. Only a shape he cannot reach, and the growing certainty that something is waiting for him to remember it.

As the corridor’s logic fractures, doors vanish, a reflection moves a half second too soon, heat arrives before pain does, and fragments of another life surface around him: a kitchen gone silent with dread, a father’s temper, a younger brother who needs protecting, a silence learned early and kept for years. The line between where he is and where he has been begins to dissolve, and the reader is left piecing together, alongside him, what happened and what it has cost him to forget.

Until the Light Resolves is a slow-burn psychological novella about the architecture the mind builds to survive what it cannot yet face. Surreal, interior, and quietly devastating, it moves between an uncanny, liminal present and the sharp specificity of memory.

For readers of The Yellow Wallpaper and The Raw Shark Texts, where the strange is never just atmosphere, but the shape of a mind protecting itself.

A story of memory, identity, and the long, uneven road back to being known, including to oneself.

Content note: this novella deals with themes of childhood abuse, domestic violence, dissociation, and suicidal ideation. Reader discretion advised.

A transgressive horror anthology.

Thirteen years. Thirteen stories. One question asked again and again until it stops sounding like a question: who's the bigger monster?

Let Them Eat Cake is not a novel dressed up as an anthology, and it isn't interested in your comfort. Each of its thirteen stories stands alone, one for every year of the AIDS crisis, 1984 to 1996, and each one drags a different rich, powerful, or simply comfortable villain into the light long enough to show you exactly what they cost. Real history runs underneath every page, the Buckley op-ed that actually proposed tattooing HIV-positive men, the real amendment that gutted AIDS education funding, the real drug that worked, eventually, for whoever could afford it first. This book didn't invent the cruelty. It just refused to look away from it.

The people fighting back in these pages are not heroes. They're damaged, furious, and often just as capable of real horror as the people they're aimed at. You'll root for them anyway. You might feel sick about that by the last page. That's the point.

This is a book for people who already know silence has a body count, and who are tired of being asked to stay quiet about it anyway.

Coming soon.

For readers of Clive Barker, Dennis Cooper, and anyone who ever stood in the back of a room with a fist raised and a sign that said SILENCE = DEATH.