Welcome.
You’re stepping into a world of shadowy futures, bad choices, and strange miracles. The fiction here lives where neo-noir, surrealism and myth bleed into each other: revenge stories that won’t give you clean justice, metaphysical satire that puts God on the witness stand, dystopias that feel uncomfortably close to tomorrow.
The non-fiction goes after the machinery behind the stories we’re sold—true crime, romance, superhero universes, “self-help,” the platforms that package all of it. I pull at the seams, follow the money, and drag the backstage lights on, while still leaving room for the uncanny, the absurd and the fantastic.
Whether it’s a novel or an investigation, the aim is the same: to sit with you in that twilight space between what is and what might be, where every character has something to hide, every corporation has a script to protect, and every quiet sentence is carrying more weight than it admits.
But first, a poem.
But first, a poem.
The Soul should always stand ajar
The Soul should always stand ajar,
That if the heaven inquire,
He will not be obliged to wait,
Or shy of troubling her.
Depart, before the host has slid
The bolt upon the door,
To seek for the accomplished guest,
Her visitor no more.
— Emily Dickinson (c. 1865)
Emily Dickinson wrote from a small house in Amherst while the United States was coming apart. In the mid-1860s, when the poem that begins “The Soul should always stand ajar” is usually dated, she was in her thirties, the Civil War was ending in blood and shock, and New England was thick with revivalist Christianity and respectable certainties.
A woman in her position was supposed to move smoothly through the script: make a public declaration of faith, marry, belong to a church and a family, accept the given answers. Dickinson quietly refused almost all of it. She withdrew from public worship, never married, and turned inward, building a life that looked reclusive from the street but was ferociously active on the page—hundreds of poems in a few intense years, circling God, death, love, and the terrifying strangeness of consciousness.
“The Soul should always stand ajar” is not a pretty abstraction from that life; it is her whole stance compressed into a single image. The soul is a door left slightly open: not barricaded, not thrown wide, but held at that deliberate, risky angle. In the poem, Heaven is not a battering ram but a hesitant visitor, “shy of troubling her.”
The soul chooses to remain ready for that kind of arrival, to let in whatever vast and transforming experiences might knock—grief, joy, terror, revelation—without giving any of them the right to bolt the door from the inside. The second half of the poem even warns against staying too long as a guest in any one house of meaning, lest the host slide the bar and turn you into “the accomplished Guest… Her Visitor no more.” Openness, for Dickinson, is always paired with the right to leave.
That position was extraordinary in her time and place. The culture around her wanted clean lines: firm conversions, fixed doctrines, patriotic stories to make sense of the war. Dickinson’s poems move in the opposite direction.
They approach the absolute—God, the afterlife, the nature of reality—not to nail it down, but to feel its pressure on the nerves. She uses the language of hymns and scripture, then fractures it with dashes, slant rhymes, and compressed images that feel more like electrical shocks than arguments. Instead of offering a settled theology, she makes the reader inhabit the state of being “ajar”: never fully closed to the possibility of the divine or the sublime, never so sure of any explanation that it cannot be unsettled again by experience.
Out of that upstairs room in Amherst, she built a private method for living at the edge of the ecstatic without surrendering to anyone else’s story about what it meant. She allowed herself to be altered by what was strange, terrible, or beautiful—war, loss, desire, doubt—while refusing to let church, nation, or convention dictate the final shape of her soul.
That is the force behind the line about standing ajar. It is not an invitation to vague inspiration; it is a discipline: keep the inner door slightly open, let the overwhelming in, and never let any visitor, no matter how radiant, claim permanent ownership of the house.
My work takes Dickinson’s stance and turns it outward. To attempt what Marx called a merciless critique of all that exists, you have to keep the door ajar: let reality in as it actually is. The work here assumes the world is knowable, but never simple—shot through with contradictions, surreal turns, strange beauty and genuine horror all at once.
The novels and the investigations are written from that threshold, refusing both comforting illusions and empty despair, trying instead to look steadily at how bizarre and magnificent it really is.
The Nighthawk Nocturne
Get weekly Nocturne Studios release news and free-book offers.
Novels, investigations, and alerts when something big lands—straight to your inbox.
Usually one email a week, sometimes two during launches.
Easy unsubscribe, no junk.
