The War Beneath

"There is a war going on behind things, beneath them."

Paul had been a forensic psychologist. But after his daughter's funeral, he hit the rock bottom of a spiraling addiction. When the spirits of the dead started rasping their wishes in his ears, he fled New York for withering Oceanrest--a flat-broke city barnacled to Maine's coast. There, he's spent the last five years scraping by, trying to shake off the burdens of his past, pretending to be a man without context, without history, without the secret ability to speak with the dead. But soon, all of that will be taken away from him.

Deirdre's spent the past fourteen years as a resident of Squatter City--the most distal and dilapidated of Oceanrest's gangrenous appendages. Growing and harvesting a hydroponic farm of mystic flora and esoteric plantlife, she's built a business as a drug dealer and apothecary. After years of relative peace, Deirdre's life finally seems tenable. But when one of her regular clients double-crosses her, what little serenity she's discovered quickly unravels.

Deirdre and Paul soon find themselves under attack from criminals and cultists, on the run from Quebecois mobsters, Aryan Nationalists, and a group of young men who seem dedicated to a cause of brutality and destruction on an apocalyptic scale.

S. R. Hughes inhabits the glittering darknesses between dreams but writes from Queens, NY. He’s been published in Sanitarium, the Wild Hunt eZine, and has had stories featured on several podcasts. Find him digitally as @thesrhughes.