OLIO

Title: Olio

Word Count: TBD

Genre: Dark Academia / Ghost thriller

Intended Audience: YA / Anyone

Year written: 2018 - Ongoing

History/Inspiration: In 2005 I had a dream about a desperate teenager on a college campus. The dream flashed through key scenes of this novel and told a horrifying story. It disturbed me so much that I wrote it down in short-story form.

Back then, the term “non-binary” wasn’t part of the everyday vernacular, but the character, in the dream, was distinctly androgynous and refused to use he/she pronouns, even though I knew (as one sometimes just “knows” in their own dreams) that this character was born male. The character came with a name: Jayce.

If I close my eyes I can still see the dream.

At the time, I was doing a good deal of paranormal writing, exploring many of the themes which likely inspired the dream and definitely inspired the novel.

Synopsis:

It’s November 1, 1999, the morning after a boarding school prank against the resident nerd goes terribly wrong. Good-looking privileged bad boy Jayce Hawking wakes up late that morning with little memory of what happened the night before. His friends, the beautiful twins Scottie and Lu Plover, seem to have a secret they refuse to tell. But where are the other members of their gang—Lu’s girlfriend Doe and Olio Academy royalty Wim Cormorant are missing. And what happened with the nerd kid, Jory Seer? He seems to know the answer, but why does he keep running away?

What happened last night?

Little by little it becomes more and more obvious that the answer lies somewhere in the nearby Swallow Woodlands, where, it seems, no one who enters comes out intact.