Blog Archives
The Worst In His Psyche
The Darkness Within follows a fading author who takes an experimental serum that restores his health and sends his creativity soaring, but also amplifies the violent darkness inside him. What first inspired the idea for The Darkness Within?
Frankly, I wanted to write something from an author’s perspective, but for a considerable length of time I was thinking of something along the lines of “Misery” by Stephen King. It wasn’t until I read “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde” that I realized that I wanted to do it along those lines in a modern-day reimagining.
How did you approach making Tanner someone readers could understand even as his actions become increasingly disturbing?
I truly believe that every indie publisher can utterly relate to Tanner’s hopes and fears… as well as his plight. Knowing that, I knew that I had to create a character who might be repulsive. The serum that Tanner ingests simply brings out the worst in his psyche. It serves as a megaphone. He’s a bit narcissistic, bitter, irritated, and angry. His worst qualities get amplified by the serum, and they are given an outlet and license to act through it.
Ambition is one of the novel’s central themes. What interested you about the emotional effects of reviews, rankings, sales, and other measures of creative success, and the point where healthy ambition can become destructive obsession?
Well, we’re all familiar with the effects of sending our books off into the ether riding on all our hopes and fears, and then seeing it fall flat, right? We must be gluttons for punishment because we do it over and over and over again. The drive is there to produce something people will love, that will sell well and resonate, that will climb up the charts, that will help us establish a career for doing this. But that drive can definitely become destructive. We are not our hustle, though we may think we are. We are a valuable human being independent of our hustle, and Tanner has to learn that the hard way.
Did writing a novel about an author’s obsession with success change the way you think about your own relationship with writing and publishing?
Sure, it made me commit to avoiding any and all genome-enhancing serums. 🙂
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
A chilling reimagining of Jekyll and Hyde set inside the cutthroat world of self-publishing.
Struggling author Tanner Barrett is desperate for a breakthrough. When a mysterious serum offers a shortcut to the perfect book, he takes it… and something ancient and violent awakens inside him. The monster wears his face. It knows his enemies by name.
Told through deteriorating diary entries that crack and splinter in real time, The Darkness Within follows Tanner’s slow, irreversible unraveling. His career rises. His mind fractures. The line between the writer and the beast disappears.
What would you sacrifice to write the perfect book?
Literary horror at its most intimate and relentless. Tanner Barrett wanted to be remembered. He got his wish; just not the way he imagined. A slow-burn psychological descent that builds dread page by page and leaves an ending that stays with you.
The Darkness Within
Aaron Ryan’s The Darkness Within is a psychological horror novel told through dated journal entries, mostly written by Tanner Barrett, a once-famous author who’s desperate for another bestseller. Tanner accepts an experimental serum called Syntax, believing it’ll restore his health and sharpen his creativity. It works almost immediately: his chronic pain disappears, his writing accelerates, and his new novel races up the charts. The catch is that Syntax doesn’t simply improve Tanner. It amplifies everything already inside him, including his vanity, resentment, envy, and appetite for revenge. What begins as an author’s frustrated account of a fading career gradually becomes the record of an addiction, a transformation, and a series of increasingly brutal crimes.
The journal format is the book’s strongest storytelling choice. Tanner’s shifting language lets us experience his deterioration from the inside rather than watching it from a safe distance. His early entries are conversational, defensive, and packed with complaints about reviews, scammers, sales, and the exhausting business of self-publishing. After taking Syntax, his prose becomes grander and more theatrical, then fragmented and frantic as the serum takes control. Tara’s entries provide a helpful counterweight. Her affection for her brother makes his collapse feel personal, especially when she realizes that his hunger for recognition had already weakened his moral boundaries before the serum arrived. The novel’s central idea comes through clearly: Syntax creates the physical monster, but Tanner’s obsession gives it direction.
The obvious comparison is Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a connection the novel openly embraces. Like Jekyll, Tanner uses a substance to unlock a more powerful version of himself and discovers that the liberated personality has desires of its own. Ryan’s modern spin is to root that divided identity in the attention economy. Tanner isn’t chasing forbidden pleasure so much as visibility, praise, sales, and proof that he still matters. That makes his monster feel tied to contemporary anxieties about personal branding, online criticism, creative burnout, and the pressure to turn art into measurable success. The author also cites Stevenson in the afterword, describing Tanner’s story as a descent in which public image and private character pull further apart.
At times, Tanner’s repeated rants about rankings, promotion, scammers, and reviewers linger longer than the plot needs, but that repetition also shows how thoroughly his career has consumed his identity. The horror grows from that fixation, so the publishing details aren’t merely background. They’re the environment in which his bitterness breeds. By the final pages, Tanner has achieved the recognition he wanted while destroying the person who wanted it, and Tara’s closing revelation gives the ending a nasty sense of continuation rather than closure. The Darkness Within is a blunt, energetic cautionary tale about ambition becoming addiction. It works best when it treats the monster as an enlarged portrait of Tanner himself, because the most unsettling part isn’t that the serum changes him. It’s that it gives his buried impulses the strength to act.
Pages: 133 | ASIN : B0H6LXVP49
Blood Echoes
Aaron Ryan’s Blood Echoes follows Tracie Vossler, an ex-Marine turned prison security guard, as she becomes entangled in the horrifying mystery surrounding identical twins Elias and Gabriel Brickert. Set largely inside Airway Heights Corrections Center and told through shifting timelines, the novel begins with a murder that should be impossible and then widens into something far stranger: occult rituals, demonic possession, body-swapping, institutional panic, and a mother’s desperate fight to protect her daughter, Lela. What starts as a prison thriller curdles into supernatural horror, with blood evidence, security footage, and human memory all becoming unreliable witnesses.
I was most compelled by the novel’s atmosphere. Ryan gives Airway Heights a clammy, pressurized quality; the prison never feels like a backdrop so much as a sealed lung trying to breathe around something rotten. Tracie’s voice is brash, bruised, funny in the wrong places, and sometimes jagged enough to cut through the melodrama. Her fixation on burgers, cigarettes, nail appointments, and her daughter’s teenage moods keeps the story tethered to ordinary life even as the plot begins to levitate into the occult. That grounding matters because without it, the supernatural machinery could have felt too gaudy; with it, the horror feels personal, almost domestic.
The book also has a maximalist streak. It piles on murders, rituals, possessions, confessions, betrayals, legal fallout, and emotional wreckage with very little interest in restraint. The momentum is hard to deny. Ryan writes like someone determined to shove every locked door open, and the result is messy in a way that often feels alive. I especially appreciated how the novel refuses to let Tracie remain a clean heroine. Her love for Lela is luminous, but her choices grow morally murky, and the ending leaves a residue of grief rather than the neat click of a solved case.
I think this would be a great book for readers who enjoy supernatural horror, prison thrillers, demonic possession stories, occult suspense, body-swap horror, and psychological thrillers. Fans of Stephen King’s The Green Mile may recognize the charged prison setting and the sense that something otherworldly has slipped into a place already built for suffering, though Ryan’s novel is more lurid, more frantic, and more openly demonic. Blood Echoes is a grim and feverish book about blood ties, borrowed bodies, and the terrible cost of surviving evil.
Pages: 332 | ASIN : B0GXN2TMD5
Envision and Sculpt
Talisman: Halcyon centers around a man who has already experienced loss and betrayal and now faces an almost insurmountable conflict involving the multiverse and the search for truth. What is the most challenging aspect of writing a series?
I think, as a pantser, the biggest difficulty comes from not necessarily knowing the entire story or character arc. To be frank, I had NO idea I was going to wind up in the multiverse in Halcyon. Ha! I really didn’t. It just grew and ballooned into something far beyond my own comprehension, and I was running alongside the story, panting, just trying to keep up. I’m so pleased with how it turned out, however. You have to have at least an idea of where to take the characters. For me, one thing I really longed to do was to tie this series into my other series and standalone novels. Through references, common characters, etc., you can link them, but that doesn’t mean that this story will serve its own ends as a standalone. It has to be robust and weighty enough to do that. And where that comes from is really allowing you to get heavily invested in the lives and purposes of the protagonists. I think by the end, it all worked out pretty well. I’m pleased with it.
Many of your characters wrestle with identity across timelines or realities. What draws you to the idea of “alternate selves” as a storytelling device?
The idea for the alternate selves was there initially when I first toyed with going into the multiverse, which in and of itself wasn’t really until I was about a quarter of the way through writing Halcyon. I thought more along the lines of “Wouldn’t it be neat if…” as opposed to “I’m intentionally going to do __.” But yes – when a character is forced to come face to face with themselves, there’s a primeval awakening that happens in that confrontation. You either awake to purpose or you awake to despair, I think. It really depends on who that character is and what they decide, within themselves, they must do. My characters awoke to purpose because of the greater conflict they were embroiled in. Any time you incorporate a doppelgänger, there needs to be a closure that happens that allows both selves to depart in peace, having accomplished their mission and resuming their independent life. The multiverse allowed me that, but it was still difficult to envision and sculpt. I very much enjoyed the challenge!
Was there a particular scene or moment that changed your understanding of the story while you were writing it?
Absolutely. There is a character in the story that I really needed to complete an arc that was painful. There were also elements at the very end that I wasn’t sure it were necessarily ’safe’ to travel down… tie-ins with other novels of mine that would definitely bridge the gap and allow more of the “Aaronverse” to take shape, but would they inherently violate the canon of those stories in the writing of this one? I really wasn’t sure. The best I could do was to honor them each with good storytelling. The arc of the character, and the subsequent arc of the story as a whole, really helped me to see the larger picture of what I was writing. I think that’s the luxury of being a pantser: your eyes are opened in the writing just as much as your readers’ eyes will be opened in the reading.
Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?
Definitely! I am currently working on my first overtly horror novel, Blood Echoes, set to be released in May. It is a standalone thriller. I do not have any plans to revisit the Dissonance hexalogy or The End or Talisman trilogies, but I do have hopes of constructing a fantasy novel to honor my primary literary inspiration, J.R.R. Tolkien. We’ll see if I’m finally courageous enough to do that, wink wink…. 🙂
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Liam “Foxy” Mayfield never asked to be the Last Iskander, nor to wield a power that can tear the omniverse apart. But then he, Arion Peridifyca – the haunted hunter of the Iskander legacy – and Onyx Sleater, now the cosmic nexus Soteria, discover their grief has been weaponized by the alien Aeterium Axis, and their uneasy alliance becomes the only hope for countless worlds.
As Arion struggles to unite the 743 Iskanders he once betrayed, Soteria’s growing powers make her both a beacon and a battleground for the hearts of her companions. Liam, caught between love, loss, and the terrifying force of the Iskander’s Justice, must decide what he’s willing to sacrifice to end the Axis’s reign of servitude. Their journey leads to the Great Convocation on Proxima Centauri b, where ancient crimes are confessed and a fractured army must choose unity or vengeance. With a monstrous Grievefiend lurking in the multiverse guarding the key to their enemy’s stronghold and betrayal lurking in the shadows, the trio faces a war not just for freedom, but for the very fabric of reality.In an omniverse where grief is currency and trust is fragile, can three broken souls rewrite fate itself—or will their pasts consume them before the final battle begins?
Talisman: Halcyon
Talisman: Halcyon is a science fiction adventure novel with strong superhero and space opera DNA, but I think it’s really a story about grief getting dragged across the stars. Author Aaron Ryan picks up Liam Mayfield’s story after betrayal, loss, and revelation have already cracked his world open, then sends him into a larger conflict involving Onyx, Arion, the Aeterium Axis, the multiverse, and a search for truth that keeps changing shape as the book goes on. The scale is huge, with cosmic alliances, alternate selves, and a widening war for liberation, but the emotional center stays tied to Liam’s pain, his family, and the question of what remains when the promise you built your life around turns out to be false.
I really enjoyed Ryan’s willingness to go big. This book is packed with lore, declarations, training, revelations, and confrontation, and at times it has the full-throttle energy of a graphic novel stretched into prose. But I think that’s part of the book’s identity. It is earnest in a way that many contemporary sci-fi books try to dodge. It wants the emotions to be felt clearly. It wants the stakes to sound like stakes. And when that works, it really works. The shifting viewpoints from Arion, Onyx, and Liam give the novel a layered feel, especially because each of them carries a different mix of loyalty, longing, and suspicion. I found myself especially interested in how Onyx grows into Soteria and how the book lets attraction, jealousy, and memory complicate what could have been a more straightforward good-versus-evil story.
I also appreciated that Halcyon is not content to stay a revenge story. It starts to feel like one kind of sci-fi saga, then opens into something stranger and more reflective, especially once the multiverse material and the doubled identities come into view. There is a scene where Liam and Onyx confront alternate versions and people they thought were gone, and it gives the book a haunted quality that I genuinely liked. It makes the story feel less like a straight corridor and more like a hall of mirrors, where every choice throws back another version of regret or hope. The dialogue can lean theatrical, and the mythology is occasionally dense. But even when I felt that, I never felt indifference. The book has conviction. It believes in its world, its pain, and its big moral struggle, and that kind of commitment carries real weight.
Having read other books in the series, along with Dissonance, The Phoenix Experiment, The Slide, Forecast, and The End, one of the real pleasures of Halcyon was catching the tie-ins and seeing how the author keeps pulling threads from those earlier stories into something larger and more connected. That gave this novel an added charge for me. It felt less like an isolated sequel and more like another major piece locking into place. What’s emerging now feels like an “Aaronverse,” a shared story world where apocalyptic stakes, sci-fi mythology, and spiritual questions keep folding back into each other in ways that reward longtime readers.
I would recommend Talisman: Halcyon most to readers who enjoy ambitious indie science fiction, superhero-inflected cosmic fiction, and long-form saga storytelling that leads with heart rather than restraint. This book is emotional, mythic, and fully invested in redemption, loss, power, and destiny. Readers who want passion, scale, and a story that wears its soul on its sleeve will probably find a lot to admire here.
Pages: 385 | ASIN : B0GQXHM7NN
Profound Human Elements at Stake
Talisman: Nexus follows a man known as the Talisman on a quest to rescue his sons as he faces the consequences of the cosmic bargain he made to bring back his wife. When you finished the first book in this series, did you know the direction you would take with Book 2?
No, because I never really do. As a pantster, I write very organically. Although I have a rough idea of where I’m going, I honestly didn’t have a clue with Talisman. I knew generally what I wanted to accomplish with Talisman: Subterfuge, but with Talisman: Nexus (and Talisman: Halcyon), they were the hardest novels I’ve ever written – I mean that – and they required a lot of extra push, imagination, stretching, and intentionality to get them done. In some ways, I feel like I had nowhere to go with the characters in Talisman: Nexus, given that they were all essentially trapped in The Refuge. The only one who could teleport out of there would be Liam. Ultimately, I did know that I wanted to have some kind of redemption, but I wasn’t sure what shape or tone that would take. I’m content and glad at how it all transpired, however.
Family is clearly the emotional core of the novel. How did Liam’s role as a father shape the way you wrote the stakes of the story?
Well, I’m a daddy of two boys, 10 and 6. If I were separated, or disconnected, or alienated from them, I would be disassembled. They are the title of one of my latest books: You are my whole Earth. They truly are. Where do you go if you don’t have an Earth? You drift. That’s what Liam’s doing…. Drifting, mindlessly and numbly fulfilling this Faustian bargain foisted upon him in the bleak hope that the Aeterium Axis will do what they said and restore his wife to him. It’s not founded on a false premise or fantastical thinking: they’ve proven that they’re mysterious and able to channel Janine’s voice to him. So he does have proof. Nonetheless, it’s pulled him away from his remaining family, his sons; it’s alienated him from his in-laws, his deceased wife’s parents, and it’s made him a vigilante on the run. All of that has taken a great toll on him, and he wants nothing more than to be connected with his boys.
When writing science fiction with dystopian elements, how do you keep the world grounded emotionally?
With humanity at its center. There have to be profound human elements at stake, and those stakes have to be great and weighty. I tried to do that with Nexus. I knew that Carson & Joseph had to be captured by The Zorander. What would happen to them after that, however, was anybody’s guess. I certainly didn’t know. Would I, as the writer of the story, allow them to be killed, plunging the already-vigilante Liam further into darkness and thirst for vendetta? I couldn’t do that because that’s what the Zorander is, and Liam is not the Zorander. He is very much human. I had to keep coming back to that loss, that dread, that pain of losing his wife eternally and now his sons temporarily. The stakes were real and profound, and, again, as a daddy, I would be disassembled if I were alienated from them or if I lost them.
Can you give us a glimpse inside the next book in the Talisman series? Where will it take readers?
Talisman: Halcyon is the most sci-fi of ANY sci-fi books I’ve ever written. It took me to Asimovian levels of creativity. James SA Corey stuff. I have always written in this universe, but suddenly I was hopping the multiverse with sorcerers, magic, intelligent and conversant aliens, superpowers, large ships with thrusters, strange planets and star systems, teleporting across worlds, I mean, I have NEVER written stuff of this gravity before. It truly stretched me as a writer, and I’m so grateful for that. Writers SHOULD be stretched at every turn, and the Talisman series stretched me in ways I never thought possible. You’ll see some crazy stuff happening in Talisman: Halcyon that will directly unite it with my Dissonance series, as well as with my other books, The Slide, The End, and The Phoenix Experiment. It’s truly turned into an Aaronverse, and I think that’s very cool. 😊
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
===
Talisman: Nexus opens in the bleak, icy expanse of Svalbard, where Liam “Foxy” Mayfield – known as The Talisman – stands at the crossroads of personal devastation and cosmic intrigue. His sons, Joseph and Carson, have been abducted by The Zorander, a former Talisman driven by vengeance, forcing Liam into a confrontation that is as much about family as it is about fate.
He is now gutted, having bargained with the alien Aeterium Axis to save one thousand lives in exchange for the resurrection of his wife, Janine… and his mission has become nothing short of a nightmare.
Within The Refuge, a clandestine Svalbard base, Liam’s allies and loved ones gather in anxious anticipation. The group is fractured by blame, particularly toward former President Vance Cardona, whose alliance with President Evelyn Lynch led to Liam’s exposure and vulnerability. Journalist Onyx Sleater, once obsessed with unmasking the vigilante she dubbed the “Dark Ghost,” is now fiercely protective of Liam.
Will Liam be able to save his sons? Will he triumph over The Zorander? What will the relationship dynamic be between Liam and his sons? And will Onyx Sleater have a much greater part to play that binds everyone together in an unexpected nexus?
The shift from personal quest for resurrection to universal battle for liberation approaches.
===
From the author of Talisman: Subterfuge comes its stunning sequel, Talisman: Nexus, balancing intimate family drama with escalating cosmic stakes. The pacing moves from tense, character-driven confrontations to high-stakes action and revelation. Aaron Ryan of the Dissonance alien invasion saga, THE END Christian Dystopian saga, Forecast, The Slide and The Phoenix Experiment delivers yet another explosive story in Talisman: Nexus. Read it and prepare for the final reckoning in Talisman: Halcyon!
The Universe’s Playground
Talisman: Subterfuge follows a shattered war hero who becomes a secret superpowered vigilante after a cosmic force offers to resurrect his wife, if he can save one thousand lives before his darker self destroys him. What inspired the moral dilemma at the heart of Liam’s deal with the Aeterium Axis?
My first thought was that there’s something or someone that just won’t leave Planet Earth alone. Either we’re the universe’s playground, or we just haven’t learned from previous lessons, and now we must do so again. Liam “Foxy” Mayfield happens to get caught up in this conundrum, just as Jet and others were in the “Dissonance” saga. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there were someone sentient out there, far more galactically nefarious than the gorgons, who come with a seemingly innocent demand of restoring the balance?
The Zorander is terrifying. How did you approach crafting a villain who is essentially the hero’s twisted reflection?
There’s always a backstory. It’s a bit of “been there, done that.” The Zorander used to be, for all intents and purposes, the Iskander / Talisman. But he was betrayed, and you’re beginning to learn that the Aeterium Axis might not in fact be all that they claim to be; they certainly didn’t do the Zorander any favors, and that’s why he has become bitter and hardened.
Liam’s grief feels incredibly real on the page. Did you draw from any personal experiences or research when writing his emotional arc?
Anyone who has been bereaved can relate to Liam. However, beyond that there is the earnest hope that he can essentially become UN-bereaved, and, taxing though his charge may be, he follows through on it and delivers the goods, pursuing that hope to its end. I’ve been there…kind of a sunk-cost fallacy mindset: he’s too far in now to reverse course. He’s too committed and has come too far now to abandon hope, even though on paper it seems that this pursuit is nothing more than a vain one. Hope always pushes us on. The question now is, is this hope tangible? Trustworthy? Or…even likely?
Are there hints about the larger universe or future installments hidden in the reporter’s storyline or the nature of the Aeterium Axis?
Perhaps? 😊 That’s all I’ll say for now. I will say that Liam Mayfield is a direct pull from the ‘Dissonanceverse,’ as Rosie Campion is – she has appeared in several of my other novels. Liam seemed a natural fit for this spinoff series, but I’m not convinced there is another storyline for him or Onyx beyond this. I’m a pantser, an organic writer, so I have to write it and see how it all plays out before I commit to anything additional beyond the end of this trilogy.
Author Links: GoodReads | X | Facebook | Website
Fail, and another soul he cherishes will be lost forever.
Armed with supernatural abilities and a relentless drive, The Talisman operates in the shadows, leaving only golden talismans as proof of his existence. But as a determined journalist closes in on his secrets and a vengeful former talisman hunts him across worlds, The Talisman’s quest for redemption becomes a desperate race against time—and fate.
Talisman: Subterfuge is a pulse-pounding blend of sci-fi intrigue and raw human emotion, where every rescue comes at a devastating cost and every choice could tip the balance between hope and oblivion. Will The Talisman’s sacrifice be enough to save those he loves, or will the darkness claim him first? For fans of high-stakes thrillers and cosmic mysteries, Talisman: Subterfuge is an unforgettable journey into the heart of loss, loyalty, and the price of second chances.
Talisman: Subterfuge
Aaron Ryan’s Talisman: Subterfuge kicks off with a hero who is anything but heroic. Liam “Foxy” Mayfield is a celebrated veteran from a past alien war, but he’s a total wreck. His wife, Janine, was killed by a stray alien, and he’s completely shattered. He’s estranged from his sons and his father-in-law, who just happens to be the President. Then, some mysterious cosmic power called the Aeterium Axis shows up. They give him a crazy deal. He has to save one thousand human lives. If he pulls it off, they’ll bring his wife back from the dead. So Liam accepts, and he becomes this secret vigilante known as “The Talisman,” using new superpowers like teleportation and foresight to save people. It’s not all straightforward, though. A dark, twisted version of himself called The Zorander is hunting him. Plus, a reporter who looks identical to his dead wife is getting dangerously close to the truth.
The writing is fast, it’s raw, and it’s full of emotion. I really felt Liam’s grief. It was heavy, and it made his decision to take this impossible deal feel completely real. I mean, who wouldn’t take that chance? The core idea of “balance” was fascinating. Liam is out there saving lives, which is great, but he’s also killing the bad guys without a second thought to do it. It really makes you wonder. Is he still a hero? Or is he just a desperate man who will do anything to get his wife back? I found myself rooting for him, even when his actions were pretty questionable.
The plot is just non-stop. One minute Liam is saving a wedding party from a landslide, and the next he’s in a brutal, supernatural fight. And then the government, the very people he helped save in the last war, turns on him. Talk about a rough week. I was genuinely angry for him. The author, Aaron Ryan, just keeps piling on the pressure, and it makes for a story you can’t put down. It felt like a dark, gritty comic book. I also liked getting the different viewpoints. We get inside the reporter’s head, and we even see the world through the villain’s eyes. The Zorander is a really spooky dude, and his chapters were intense.
I’d absolutely recommend this book. It’s an emotional rollercoaster. If you loved the author’s Dissonance series, this is a no-brainer. You’ll love seeing Foxy again. If you’re new to this world, that’s fine too. The book does a great job of giving you the backstory you need. This is the perfect read for anyone who likes their sci-fi fast, full of action, and packed with a whole lot of heart.
Pages: 320 | ASIN: B0FV8PL7ZG
