Unseen in the Crowd - a Novella
To stay unseen is to survive. To be seen is to resist.
This newsletter is named for the bridge-builder and the protector of the city, and most months the bridge runs between fairly distant shores — a data pipeline on one side, an eighteenth-century grimoire on the other. This month the two shores are closer than they have ever been, because the dispatch is about a book that could only have been written from the middle of the bridge.
My novella, Unseen in the Crowd, is out now, in Kindle and paperback editions.
Some of you will remember a note here last November: a story had emerged “as if made for these times, yet hearkening back to times past,” with one scene left to write. This is that story, finished — and it turned out to be my first published work of speculative fiction, after four books of occult scholarship, translation, and poetry.
The story
New York, October 2028. Six Wilson has spent three years perfecting the art of being invisible. A grey coat. A silent apartment. A job sorting people into categories for the machine he fears. Then a stranger presses a note into his hand on a crowded train: You are in danger.
Before New York, Six was William Wilson VI, the last son of a ruined Natchez dynasty — and the man blamed for the murder of James Beauregard, the senator’s son he loved in secret. He carries the only surviving proof of the Project, the machinery of camps and quotas behind the new America’s parades. The resistance wants him to testify. The regime wants him erased.
To stay unseen is to survive. To be seen is to resist.
The bridge behind it
In my consulting life I have spent years studying how institutions see: how data is gathered, joined, classified, and acted upon — and what happens to the people on the receiving end of those classifications. Most of that work is about making systems see better. At some point the inevitable question arrives: what would it take to make a system unable to see you at all? And what would it cost a person to live that way — not for a weekend, but for years?
Six’s invisibility is not a superpower. It is a discipline, and a grief. That felt truer to me than any speculative gadget, because it is how disappearance actually works: not vanishing, but a thousand daily subtractions — the friend not made, the glance not returned, the name not spoken.
The past that Six flees is anchored in a real place. Magnolia Hall in Natchez, Mississippi — Greek Revival, 1858, herringbone brick — is a house I researched the way I research grimoires: obsessively, and with growing unease at what the beautiful surfaces were built to conceal. The novella’s other anchor is the Cloisters in upper Manhattan, where the Unicorn Tapestries hang. I was enraptured when we visited last year. I cannot resist a captive unicorn in a garden enclosure; what that image is doing in a story about surveillance, I will leave for you to discover.
Where to find it
Unseen in the Crowd is available on Amazon — $2.99 on Kindle, free in Kindle Unlimited, and in a 5.25×8 paperback.
If you read it and it stays with you, an honest review on Amazon or Goodreads is the single most useful thing you can do for a small book like this one. Reviews are how novellas find the readers they were written for.
Meanwhile, on the other shores
The rest of the desk is busy: edits on The Magical Art, Vol. II are nearing completion, The Song of Oberon is forthcoming from Papaveria Press, and the short-story anthology that Unseen in the Crowd belongs to continues to grow.
More dispatches soon. Thank you, as ever, for standing on the bridge with me.