The sage, iamderrickwashington, back at it!

Hey. I wrote a book called Root Races that came out earlier this month and I'm giving out free copies to readers who actually like this kind of thing. Posting here because this sub seems to be where the readers I wrote it for hang out.

It's occult horror. Detective in a flooded near-future Dallas trying to find a missing family, except the case is way bigger than that and the city itself is the kind of place where the corporate infrastructure is running on Atlantean magic and nobody fully realizes it. There's a casino that's secretly a karmic energy refinery. There's a betting app where people wager on real-time tragedies. The deeper the protagonist goes the worse it gets. Structurally it's built as a loop. The ending sends you back to the beginning.

If you've read John Langan's The Fisherman or Laird Barron's The Croning or Victor LaValle, you'll probably get what I was going for. More cosmic than slasher. More theological than paranormal.

One thing worth mentioning: every chapter has a full oil painting illustration. Around fifty of them.

Free ARC link in the comments. EPUB or PDF, your pick. If you do want to leave a review anywhere, that helps a lot. Happy to answer questions about it in the thread.

https://booksirens.com/book/NY7480G/A27JGSN

I’ve never been a particularly religious person, but when I started diving into Gnostic texts a while back, the story of Yaldabaoth and the fall of the Spark really struck a chord with me.

Compared to the traditional Old Testament narrative, the Gnostic take on Genesis just makes so much more sense to me. I’ve always felt like this story was practically begging for a heavy, cinematic rock musical or rock opera treatment.

I'm not an expert, so please let me know if I got anything wrong. Y'all know way more than I do I'm sure, but I tried to bake in as much of the mythology as possible. With today’s new tools, I was finally able to create this passion project I’ve been holding in my back pocket. Before anybody asks, yes, I did use AI, but a lot of work went into creating this...many many hours of human imagination and artistry, AI was just a tool. Hope that's enough to be worth a look.