They didn't come to destroy us. They came because they thought we were adorable.Eighty thousand light-years away, an alien civilization made of pure sound and rhythm catches a stray signal from Earth — a person rapping badly into a hairbrush in front of a cracked mirror. To the Vael, who believe nothing beautiful should ever be allowed to stay dim, that small, hungry, hopeful creature is the most precious thing in the sky. So they make a decision, and it sounds almost sweet: our little dolls deserve a raise.The invasion arrives without ships, without armies, without a single drop of blood. The Vael come as a frequency — and then they come as a kiss. One gentle press of the mouth, and you are replaced: a perfect copy with your laugh, your memories, your love for everyone you've ever loved. The copy passes every test. It weeps at the right movies. The only difference is that it believes, with the force of an ancient and loving god, that your purpose is to shine — and it will not rest until it has pressed that gift into the mouth of everyone you know.It's worse than zombies. A zombie warns you. The Vael look exactly like us — like us, but finally happy. You cannot tell who has been changed. Your mother. Your best friend. The person who handed you this book.Music critic Marcus Deel has spent his whole life drawing one clean line between good and bad — and now he's one of the last dim humans left, hiding in a basement, learning that the only way to prove you're still human is to hate something out loud. Because the Vael love everything. And love, it turns out, can erase a person more gently than any weapon ever invented.A haunting, hypnotic science-fiction thriller about fame, fear, and the terrible mercy of being loved until you disappear.Find something you hate today. Out loud. It's the last light we've got.

Anna Belle Grace grew up invisible — a quiet girl from rural Alabama with a drunk mother, an abusive father, and nothing but the deep country woods to raise her right.But Anna has a secret in a mason jar at the back of the fridge.A tincture she brewed herself at fourteen from wild mushrooms and a native vine — a shamanic preparation so precisely calibrated it doesn't just alter her perception. It opens it. When Anna doses, she can feel people. Not their words. Their nature. What they're planning. What they're hunting.She calls it her mood medicine. The town calls her a witch.When she gets an emergency call to babysit five-year-old Lily Morrison alone in a house deep in the Alabama woods, Anna is already dosed. Good thing. Because the moment she walks through the door she feels him — a man hiding in the closet with an axe and a specific kind of darkness she has no name for but recognizes instantly.Anna gets Lily to the truck. Then she goes back inside.What happens next leaves nothing behind but ash.FBI Special Agent Cole Briggs arrives in Jasper County with a badge, a forensic chemistry degree, and a missing persons case that makes no sense. The suspect is a Waffle House waitress they're calling a witch. The victim was a violent predator with priors in three states. And the only evidence is an axe with Pickett's prints on it and a mason jar of something in Anna's fridge that Cole — who did his thesis on psilocybin pharmacology and has four personal field tests to his name — recognizes immediately.He should arrest her. Instead he takes her to dinner.What begins as an investigation becomes something neither of them expected: a partnership, a calling, and the discovery that Anna Bell Grace is not the only one. That people like her have always existed. That the plants have always known.And that the thing she carries in that jar is not making her dangerous.It's making her able to see what was already there.The Shamanic Tincture is a Southern Gothic supernatural thriller — raw, atmospheric, and relentlessly human. For readers who want their heroines forged in real fire, not born into power.