BookPsychological horror
Delirium Tremens
Do not answer after dark. Do not cross the bone line.
Overview
John Glisner’s wife is dead. The police call it suicide. John can’t remember the night—and he can’t stop shaking.
With his best friend, Hunter Wallace, John retreats to an abandoned family farmhouse on Van Drake Road to dry out and disappear. But the house doesn’t want him sober. The phone rings after dark. A locked red room opens on its own. A hidden shot of bourbon waits like an invitation.
As the storm closes in, John is pulled toward the leaning barn, a masked figure watching, and a series of offers that promise relief, absolution, even a rewritten past. Each comes with a price—and withdrawal has made John uniquely vulnerable to whatever is bargaining in the dark.
Delirium Tremens is a feverish psychological horror novel about addiction, grief, and the terrifying question: what would you trade to forget?
Formats
Hardcover ISBN: 979-8-9943981-0-4
Paperback ISBN: 979-8-9943981-1-1
Page count: 343
Excerpt
From Chapter One: “The Inventory”
John Glisner came awake the way a man surfaces from dark water: gasping, disoriented, and already tired.
His mouth tasted like pennies and old whiskey. His tongue felt too big for his teeth. The headache behind his eyes was not a pain so much as a pressure, a steady thumb pushing inward. When he swallowed, his throat rasped like sandpaper.
Sunlight knifed through the crooked blinds and painted hard stripes across his bedroom wall. The brightness made his stomach roll. He squinted and tried to remember when he had come upstairs, when he had pulled the covers over himself, when he had stopped being a person and started being a body.
There was only the familiar, unreliable blur of the night before: a bar light smeared into a comet; Hunter's laugh; a bottle passed back and forth like a microphone; his own voice promising someone, again, that he'd be good.
He sat up slowly. Denim pulled against his skin. His shirt was still buttoned wrong, the collar crooked. Yellow stains bloomed across the front of his jeans, dried into darker islands. He stared at them for a beat, waiting for the shame to land in the place where it usually landed.
Nothing landed. Not yet.
The apartment was silent in that unnatural way it got when Alice wasn't moving around downstairs. Alice always moved. Not loudly, not with the stomping impatience of someone trying to be heard. She moved with purpose - a cup rinsed, a dish set to dry, a light turned off in a room she wasn't in. The small domestic sounds that told him somebody was holding the world together.
His throat tightened. He swung his legs off the bed and stood, bare feet searching for the cool familiarity of carpet.
His calves screamed. Dark bruises climbed both legs like spilled ink. He looked down, tried to fit an explanation around them, and came up empty.
A memory tried to surface - concrete, a curb, laughter, his own hand slamming into something hard - then slid away, slick as oil.
He rubbed his face, a hand dragging over stubble and clammy skin.
"Alice?" His voice came out cracked. "Hey. Babe?"
No answer.
His phone lay face-down on the nightstand, screen smeared with a thumbprint. When he tapped it awake, the brightness stabbed his eyes and a cascade of notifications slid down—missed calls, unread texts, the digital proof of a night he couldn’t remember surviving.
ALICE (13).
The timestamps ran down the screen in a neat, horrifying ladder: 12:48 a.m. 1:02. 1:17. 2:05. 2:11.
The last message was short enough to feel like a fist: “Please come home. Please.”
Under it sat a reply from him, sent at 2:11 a.m.—a single line, all lowercase, like it had been typed with a sloppy thumb in the dark: “i’m on my way. love you.”
John stared at it until the letters stopped looking like language. He didn’t remember sending it. He didn’t remember leaving. He didn’t remember being the kind of man who actually came home when he said he would.
A voicemail icon pulsed beside her name. He pressed it. A second of hiss filled his ear, then the beginning of her voice—
He stopped it, thumb slamming the screen hard enough to sting. Hearing Alice right now felt like letting the morning decide what it meant.
He tried calling anyway. It rang twice and rolled into her recorded greeting, bright and casual, a version of her still alive inside a machine. John hung up before the beep, throat closing.
The phone trembled in his hand. Or maybe it was him. Probably him.
He padded to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face. The mirror gave him back a version of himself he didn't want to claim: puffy eyes, a split at the corner of his lip, a faint bruise blooming along his cheekbone. He stared at that bruise too, waiting for the shame, the anger, any emotion that would anchor him.
Still nothing.
Downstairs, the living room and kitchen were too clean for the night he couldn't remember. The white carpet looked like it had survived. The coffee table held two empty cups, set neatly side by side, as if someone had tried to make normal out of something that refused to be normal.
The couch sat with its back to him. Over the armrest spilled a curtain of red hair.
Relief arrived first. Small, stupid relief. She had fallen asleep down here. She was mad, sure, but she was here.
He moved closer and tried to shape his voice into gentle.
"Hey," he said, soft as he could manage. "Wakey-wakey. Rise and shine, sweetheart."
He stepped around the couch and the room changed.
Vomit stained the carpet in a wide orange smear. Bits of chicken sat in it like broken teeth. Dark blood threaded through the mess, too much blood, the kind of blood that didn't belong outside a body.
His stomach dropped. The air itself felt wrong, thick with a sweet-metal smell.
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