The baby did not cry.
That was the first thing Dr. Evelyn Hart noticed — and the last thing she would ever forgive.
When her daughter is born blind, limbless, and silent, geneticist Evelyn Hart breaks every rule she swore she’d never break again. The unauthorized therapy works. But it is not working the way she designed it.
Thirty-seven miles south, in a classified military facility, a teenage boy sits in permanent containment. His skin produces a compound that rewrites human biology through proximity. Through touch. Through love. Everyone who gets close becomes dependent. Everyone who leaves begins to die. And Evelyn’s husband, who stole three drops of their daughter’s blood to keep the boy alive, is already too deep to pull free.
When sixteen-year-old Elara Voss arrives carrying compound in her own scars from a tragedy she barely survived, the line between weapon and victim dissolves. The boy is not a monster. He is lonely. And the compound spreading through the Hart family does not trap them — it makes the trap feel like home.
WOMB OF SHADOWS is dark literary sci-fi horror — biological dread with the prose of literary fiction and the gut-punch of body horror. A 97,000-word debut and Book One of the GOTNA trilogy.
For readers of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation, Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is the Flesh, Caitlin Starling’s The Luminous Dead, and Nick Cutter’s The Troop.
The compound is patient. The compound has time.
