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Grand Battles and Long Journeys
Awakening follows a former quarterguard who turned killer-for-hire in an underwater nation filled with class violence and magic, who is forced into the Bishop’s rebellion. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve been building the world of Atlamaria and eventually writing the Goremage story for over nine years. It originally started as a completely different novel idea that came about from a short story in a high school creative writing class. I shelved that and ended up expanding the world into a homebrew Dungeons and Dragons campaign a few years later, which only got two sessions in. I really liked the world I had started building, and kept working on the lore and world, until I had built up the entire world of Atlamaria and Aurelithia. I’ve always loved fantasy novels and movies, and have written multiple in the past, so the finished product of the Goremage series was a sort of love-child of the years of worldbuilding I had done and some abandoned characters I wasn’t ready to let go of.
What challenges came with designing a believable underwater civilization?
I had a pretty soft science system when it comes to the sci-fi side and kind of leave a lot of it up to the reader’s imagination, which I think helps. I’ve done a lot of research on it and how it would actually be built in the world, but I think writing out the nitty gritty of that would be boring, and lose a lot of the whimsy, so it feels more believable for the reader to have a ‘less is more’ approach. I think the biggest challenge was reminding myself that they were underwater, meaning there were limitations to where they could go and what they could do (though this is a bigger issue with books two and three). Because I enjoy epic fantasy, I like the idea of grand battles and long journeys, but the entirety of Atlamaria is smaller than the state of Texas, so I had to have them travel with that in mind.
How did you balance horror elements with fantasy adventure and political intrigue?
Book one definitely focuses a lot more on the fantasy and horror elements, whereas book two leans a lot more into the political intrigue and horror. Since my goal wasn’t to write a traditional fantasy, I think it was easier to just focus on what I wanted the story to be, rather than what it ‘should’ be.
Can you give us a glimpse inside Book 2 of the Goremage series? Where will it take readers?
Book two is a much deeper dive into the politics of Atlamaria and the relationship between Pearl and Elio. Returning to Atlamaria, Pearl and Elio find the Triarch has already started their push for total control — and will stop at nothing to get it. As they struggle with their interpersonal relationship, the grieving process, and the ongoing political upheaval, they must also face just how far they’ll go for the greater good.
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Skepticism and Belief
Reflections in the Dark follows a haunted academic and a Chicago homicide detective as they investigate ritualistic murders tied to mirrors, fractured identity, and a terrifying reality pressing in from beyond the known world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The inspiration really came from wanting to merge two types of stories I’ve always loved: surreal, cosmic horror in the vein of Twin Peaks or The X-Files, and grounded noir detective fiction like the work of Raymond Chandler.
Early on, I had a very clear image in my head: it was essentially Fox Mulder paired with Philip Marlowe. I wanted that contrast: a straight-laced, reality-driven investigator encountering cases that gradually become stranger and more unexplainable, eventually drawing in someone who’s open to the paranormal, other dimensions, and the unknown.
That push and pull between skepticism and belief became the foundation of the story. It’s something The X-Files did so well, and it creates a natural tension that lets the mystery evolve from grounded crime into something much more unsettling and cosmic.
As the story developed, that dynamic evolved into Reed and Maria. I shifted the noir detective role into Maria partly because I wanted a male-female pairing, but also because it strengthened that contrast—two people approaching the same reality from completely different perspectives, forced to confront something neither of them can fully explain.
Reed Ashland and Detective Maria Voss bring different kinds of damage to the story. Which character came to you first?
That’s a tough one, because they really arrived together conceptually. From the beginning, I knew the story needed two leads, two perspectives colliding.
That said, I actually started writing Reed first. The opening chapters came from his point of view, and right away, his voice was very disjointed, surreal, and intentionally unstructured. That was always the goal with him; his experience of reality is fractured, but as I was writing, I realized pretty quickly that if the entire novel lived in that space, it would be difficult to anchor.
That’s when Maria really came into focus.
Her storyline became the grounding force of the book. While Reed drifts further into the strange and otherworldly, Maria operates in a much more linear, procedural way—investigating bodies, following evidence, moving step by step through a case. That structure gave the story a necessary through line and allowed Reed’s more abstract descent to have contrast and context.
So while Reed was technically first on the page, Maria’s side of the story became complete first. She’s the lens that holds everything together, and the balance between the two is what gives the story its shape.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
At the beginning, I honestly just wanted to write a compelling horror-mystery, something that captured the feeling I got personally from works like House of Leaves, The X-Files, and Twin Peaks. That sense of unease, mystery, and something just beyond comprehension.
But as I wrote the book, the thematic core shifted more toward the characters themselves.
What really interested me was exploring how people carry damage: grief, trauma, unresolved questions, and how that shapes who they are. Reed and Maria, on the surface, can feel like familiar archetypes, but I wanted to push beyond that and show that there’s always something deeper underneath. People aren’t as simple as they first appear.
That idea: that we often misjudge others based on surface-level impressions, became really important to me. You meet someone and think you understand them, but the more you learn, the more complicated they become. I wanted the characters to reflect that reality.
So at its core, the book is less about solving a mystery and more about how these characters navigate their own internal fractures. It’s about how we carry our past with us, how it influences our decisions, and how it quietly shapes the paths our lives take.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
Right now, I have a few projects in motion. The closest to release is a novella titled Viscera Varnish, which is essentially finished and just going through final cleanup. It’s a transgressive, art-driven horror story, and the plan is to release it in early summer.
I’m also in the middle of writing another novella, currently titled Panspermia. That’s just a working title and will most likely change, but that one leans more into sci-fi horror, drawing inspiration from shows like The X-Files and the broader ancient-aliens mythology. If everything stays on track, I’m aiming for a late summer or early fall release.
Beyond that, my next major focus will be the sequel to Reflections in the Dark. It’s still early, but my goal is to have Book Two out within about a year, tentatively targeting early 2027.
I also have several short stories appearing in upcoming anthologies this year. One is a suburban horror piece titled Night Whispers, another is a folk horror story called The Keepers, and a third, Ascended Infinity, explores the idea of uncovering hidden truths. Final anthology titles and release dates are still to be announced.
Overall, the goal is to keep a steady stream of work coming and continuing to build out this world while also exploring different corners of horror along the way.
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Across town, Dr. Reed Ashland wakes to fractured memories and impossible visions staring back at him from every mirror he passes. Once a respected philosophy professor, Reed is now a disgraced academic spiraling through grief, alcoholism, and the growing certainty that something is watching from the other side of the glass.
When Voss and Ashland are drawn into an uneasy partnership, their investigation quickly slips beyond logic. Victims appear who should not exist. Reflections behave independently. Messages surface where no human hand could have written them. And the killer they are hunting does not seem bound by the rules of a single reality.
All paths lead to a phenomenon Reed knows too well but fears to name: the Elsewhere Fold, a place that exists between worlds where memory, identity, and consciousness bleed into one another. A place that remembers everyone who enters it and does not always let them leave.
As the boundary between the Fold and the waking world begins to erode, Voss and Ashland must confront the versions of themselves reflected in the dark. Some familiar. Some monstrous. Some terrifyingly true. Because the killer they seek may not be entirely human, and if they fail, the Fold will not remain on the other side of the mirror.
Reflections in the Dark is a gripping blend of crime thriller, psychological horror, and surreal mystery that explores fractured identity, existential dread, and the darkness waiting behind every reflection. Fans of Night Film, True Detective, and the dreamlike terror of David Lynch will feel right at home.
Reflections in the Dark: A Horror-Noir
Jason Garman’s Reflections in the Dark is a horror-noir that treats reality like a crime scene and every mirror like a witness that knows more than it should. The book opens on ideas of consciousness, reflection, and fractured identity, then threads those ideas through a story that moves between police procedural, cosmic nightmare, and grief-soaked character study. Reed Ashland, the burned-out academic drawn toward impossible visions, and Detective Maria Voss, the sharp Chicago homicide detective trying to make sense of ritualistic murders, give the novel its two strongest currents. Together they make the book feel grounded and unstable at the same time, which is exactly the right tension for a story this interested in perception.
The author doesn’t treat the horror as decoration. The horror is the book’s language. It shows up in the imagery, the rhythms of the sentences, and the way ordinary spaces keep turning strange. A bedroom, a precinct, a parking garage, a hospital room, all of them become charged with the sense that something is leaning in from just outside the known world. There’s a line early on, “Reality is a story badly translated from another dimension,” and it works because it feels like a mission statement for the whole novel. That’s the kind of book this is: moody, philosophical, and deeply committed to making disorientation feel intimate rather than abstract.
It’s also a character-driven book, which gives the weirdness some real emotional weight. Reed could’ve been just the classic unraveling visionary, but he’s more damaged and human than that. Maria could’ve been just the hard-edged detective, but she carries fatigue, intelligence, and tenderness in a way that keeps her from ever feeling stock. Even the supporting relationships help round out the novel’s world, especially the glimpses of family life, old love, and accumulated loss. Those parts matter because they keep the book from floating off into pure abstraction. When the story says, “We live inside ambiguity’s prison,” it isn’t only talking about metaphysics. It’s also talking about grief, guilt, and the way people keep moving through lives they don’t fully understand.
The prose is rich, stylized, and often intentionally feverish. Garman clearly loves image-making, and when he’s in rhythm, the book can feel like it’s casting a spell. This is a novel that wants you to sink into its atmosphere more than race through its plot mechanics. The procedural spine is there, and the mystery keeps tightening, but the real pull is the mood of it all: the cracked clocks, the broken mirrors, the recurring 3:33, the sense that language itself is starting to warp. I kept coming back to how confidently the novel blends the hard-boiled and the surreal. It’s not shy about being strange, and that confidence gives it personality.
Reflections in the Dark feels less like a simple whodunit and more like a descent into a worldview, one where identity, memory, and evil keep slipping out of their usual shapes. It’s a book that wants to unsettle you, but it also wants to linger with damaged people trying to make meaning out of what’s happened to them. That combination gives it its own pulse. This is a debut that knows its obsessions and leans into them fully: mirrors, thresholds, sorrow, perception, and the awful possibility that something might be looking back. For readers who like horror with noir bones and a surreal edge, this one has a lot to chew on.
Pages: 288 | ASIN : B0GSLH62NF
