Virgil’s got problems. There’s the whole “is someone trying to kill him?” thing at work, but he thinks he can handle that. It’s what’s happening at home that’s harder to deal with. His sister, Claire, called to say Father’s getting worse. He used to just be angry. Angry about the direction of the country. Angry about politics. Disgusted and amused at ‘kids these days.’ That wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t scary. Now he’s online all the time, making threats, buying guns. He believes things that seem impossible -- things that, if true, make the world a dangerous place and things that would justify violence in response. Mom is scared. Claire, who usually knows how to handle him, is alarmed.

“He needs you, Virgil,” she tells him. We need you. So after doing everything he can to put a healthy distance between himself and the hypercritical man who raised him, Virgil’s coming home. Called back to confront Dad who, in ways large and small, shaped him into what he is today. He’s going to see if there’s anything he can do to stop him from following the bloody beliefs haunting him to their merciless, logical conclusion and lead him back into the light of normality, reason, and sanity.

Virgil’s journey starts on a rainy highway at twilight, but it goes deeper into darkness and madness than he’s capable of imagining. He’ll enter the warped universe of conspiracy theories and face what lies beneath them — a strata even stranger than the worst he can imagine: invisible dimensions, dark echoes of wisdom from antiquity, the fringes of reality shaped by neuro-pharmaceuticals and emerging technologies, and finally, behind and below everything a threat that defies logic and understanding; a threat spreading, unseen, through the world around him, dragging everyone caught in its vortex into its fun-house reflection of reality.

Impostor Syndrome takes a look at our fractured contemporary moment through the distorted lens of conspiracy and at the intersection of phenomena that are reshaping how we understand the dividing line between what’s real, what’s fiction, and what happens when it becomes impossible to distinguish the two.

Book 1 is the beginning of Virgil’s journey through the four book Impostor Syndrome series. It is a work of fiction intended for adults.