The One Week the World Catches Up
For fifty-one weeks a year, I'm the strange one. I'm the one who finds the graveyard peaceful, who thinks a storm rolling in green is beautiful, who hears a floorboard settle in an empty room and leans closer instead of away.
Then comes this week.
Suddenly the whole world dresses like the inside of my head. Skeletons hang in the grocery store. Nice, normal people argue about which haunted house is worth the drive, and somebody's sweet grandmother is elbow-deep in a pumpkin with a knife, grinning. For one week, everybody admits what I know all year: the dark is fun. The dark was always fun.
That's the week I chose to give my book away.
Z-Strain isn't a story about monsters, not really. It's about ordinary people the world ended on — in a town that could be yours, under a sky that turned the wrong color. The dead in it had grocery lists and grudges and somebody waiting on them to come home. That's what makes it horror. Not the teeth. The before.
A small thing, for the week itself:
October keeps one night a year
when the veil wears thin as breath —
and everything I write in fear
is just the world, undressed.
Z-Strain is free on Kindle October 28 – November 1. Five nights. Take it home, read it with the lights however you like. I won't judge. (I know how I read.)
And if you want the dark delivered first, all year long — cover reveals, new books, the occasional poem — join The Desk Drawer at buttondown.com/asafterdark. The list hears everything before the world does.
Happy Halloween week. You all look wonderful in my world.
— A.S.
First posted October 26, 2026.