Enjoy this excerpt from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
ZEKE
Downtown Philadelphia | July, 2000
The hotel lobby isn’t super busy. Marcus is pacing outside. I’m inside, enjoying the air conditioning, half hoping Marcus won’t cut and run.
I nearly spit out my gum when Todd taps my shoulder from behind.
“Let’s go.”
Enjoy this excerpt from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
BALERO
Society Hill, Philadelphia | June, 2000
So the book club. Finally going. I get off the bus and find my way to the appointed corner at the appointed time and find a hardy Daryl, he of the acne and the long black ponytail, just parking his car. He’s flanked by two breathless young beauties. This makes him look like a programmer or a rock god, because otherwise how could he ever…
Enjoy this excerpt from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
BALERO
Spruce Hill, Philadelphia | June, 2000
That Saturday afternoon at the convention center was enough to knock us out of our usual orbit and send us off to smoke our own stashes in private. No more Stoner Paradise adventures. This isn’t anything new, but it usually happens during the school year when academia presses down on Marcus like invisible furniture. I don’t know. Something changed in him that day. He became surlier than even I sometimes get, which is saying something. I decide to hang back and let him come around, which he does, and it’s nasty.
Enjoy this excerpt from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
MARCUS
Powelton Village, Philadelphia | June, 2000
Zeke buzzes me in. He lives alone, thank Christ. I lurk beneath a parade of throbbing orange lights until I reach his door, which I bang on hard enough to jiggle off the little number under the peephole. It’s never occurred to me that the orange lights in the hallway look like ’50s flying saucers.
Enjoy this excerpt from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
BALERO
Downtown Philadelphia | June, 2000
It was a dry spell from hell. Never seen anything like it. The holy grail of friendly, stocked dealers who promptly returned their pages and weren’t crazy were suddenly impossible to find. In desperate times wishes for dealers both friendly and prompt were abandoned in favor of those who lived nearby and didn’t own a large gun collection and perhaps did fail to take their medication, but even these fleeting ghosts were not to be found throughout the dark months of April and May.
Enjoy this excerpt from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
LEAH
Northwest Philadelphia | July, 1999
The long walks started in June. I was sick of sitting around at home, pretending to read or staring at the cat. I’d disappear behind the wall of trees across the street from our house almost daily, losing myself for hours. Dad asked about this over dinner one night, but I wasn’t sure what to say. Where was I off to? Just getting some exercise? Yes, that was it. Not that it was a secret.
Enjoy this deleted chapter from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
Taking place just before the final version of the book begins, this deleted chapter finds Zeke fumbling his way towards Kenneth Holcomb’s secretive inner circle by way of a college SETI student group. (SETI is the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a real thing.) The connections Zeke makes in this group eventually lead him to attend an out-of-town astrophysics conference where he befriends some members of Holcomb’s inner circle who agree to take him in as one of their own. Some of these characters are mentioned by name in the book’s current opening chapter, at the “birthday party”.
Continue readingEnjoy this deleted chapter from my first novel, Pareidolia. The premise is available here, and the table of contents can be found here.
This is an excerpt from Balero’s journal that had for quite a long time served as the book’s opener (it was one of the very first sections I wrote). It was later moved to near the end of the book in the form of a physical journal entry that Marcus stumbles upon while holed up at Willow’s extravagant condo around the time Balero demonstrates his newfound powers to Zeke by forcing Leah’s father to materialize from the past and then vanish again.
The 2nd and 3rd sections of this intro (“urge loop” is an anagram of prologue — I was quite obsessed with anagrams while writing this book) serve as background pieces to get the reader comfortable with the world they are about to enter.
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Jason Herrboldt 