For five days, you can get the book that started everything for me without paying a cent.
From July 1 through July 5, The Everett Exorcism — the first book in my World of Shadows series — is free on Kindle. No catch, no trial, no "first chapter then a paywall." The whole book. Yours to keep.
I don't do this often. So let me tell you why I'm doing it now, and what you're actually getting if you grab it.
The book is about a priest who stopped believing
Father Niccolo Paladina does not believe in demons anymore.
That's the whole engine of the thing. Three years before the book opens, he watched his mentor die during an exorcism in Manila — screaming, on the floor, while Niccolo prayed and nothing answered. So he did what a lot of us do when faith breaks: he found a desk. He buried himself in Vatican paperwork. He became the priest who investigates possession cases on paper, from the safety of Rome, so he never has to be in the room again.
Then a young priest in Everett, Washington goes around his entire chain of command and begs the Vatican for help. And the Vatican sends Niccolo — not to perform an exorcism, but to discipline the kid for breaking protocol.
Here's the part I liked writing. Niccolo wants it to be nothing. He wants to drive into this damp little Pacific Northwest town, write his report, slap the wrist of an overeager priest, and go home. He is rooting for there to be no demon. Because if there's a demon, he has to be the exorcist again, and he is not sure he survives that a second time.
The town does not cooperate.
The local bishop is too calm. The possessed are spreading through Everett like the flu — not theatrically, not one girl strapped to a bed, but quietly, person to person, the way a real outbreak moves. And the demons aren't doing the things demons are supposed to do. They laugh at holy water. They press their hands to a rosary until the skin burns, just to make a point.
The point being: God isn't listening. And they want Niccolo to know it.
I set it in Everett on purpose. Not a gothic European cathedral, not New Orleans, not some fog-drowned village built for atmosphere. A real, ordinary Washington town — rain on the windshield, a tired diocese running on a shoestring, a parish hall that smells like old coffee. The horror works better when the backdrop is mundane. A demon in a castle is a story you've already read. A demon in a town with a Costco and a high school football team is a thing that could be happening four miles from where you're sitting. That's the version that keeps me up.
There's a second man in town, and he's worse than the demons
His name is Arthur Vangeest.
If you've read anything else of mine, that name might land. Arthur is a Church-sanctioned assassin — a man the Vatican uses for the work it doesn't put in writing. He has a reputation that empties rooms. And he has arrived in Everett on his own business: hunting the men who murdered his family, and saying, to anyone who'll listen, that the conspiracy he's chasing runs all the way up to Rome.
So now Niccolo has two problems. The thing in the town, and the man who showed up to kill it — or to use it. Arthur is not a good guy with a rough edge. He's genuinely dangerous, genuinely certain, and right often enough that you can't dismiss him. Watching a burned-out skeptic priest get tangled up with a true-believer killer was the most fun I had in the draft.
The line that the book lives on is this one:
Some demons possess bodies. Others possess institutions.
That's what The Everett Exorcism is really about. The possession in the town is the small horror. The big one is the thing wearing the Church.
Why I write religious horror, since people ask
I get the question a lot: why this genre, why the Church, why exorcisms when The Exorcist exists and nobody's topping it.
The honest answer is that religious horror is the only kind that scares me on purpose.
A monster in the woods is a problem you can shoot. A haunted house is a problem you can leave. But possession horror is about something getting inside — past the door, past the body, into the place where you keep the thing that makes you you. And the religious frame raises the stakes one more notch, because it asks the worst question available: what if you do everything right, you say every prayer, you hold up every holy symbol, and the universe just... declines to answer?
That's the fear I keep circling. Not "is there a devil." It's "is there anyone on the other end of the line." Niccolo isn't afraid of the demon. He's afraid the demon is telling the truth.
I wrote this for readers of The Exorcist and The Rite, sure, but also for people who liked Constantine — that mix of the supernatural and the procedural, an investigator working a case that happens to involve hell. There's dread in it, there's body horror in it, and there's a conspiracy underneath it that pays off across the series. It is not a quiet book. Fair warning on that: graphic violence, demonic possession, religious trauma, and the specific kind of terror that comes from an institution protecting itself.
Who this one is for
Let me save you some time. This book is for you if you liked The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty or The Rite by Matt Baglio — the slow, procedural, faith-on-trial flavor of possession story where the priest is as much the subject as the demon. It's for you if Ralph Sarchie's Deliver Us From Evil hit, or if you're the kind of person who watched Constantine and Supernatural less for the monsters and more for the worn-down men doing the dirty work between heaven and hell.
It is not a cozy read, and I won't pretend otherwise. There's graphic violence. There's body horror. There's religious trauma handled as horror rather than as a lecture. And there's an institution that would rather protect itself than protect the people it's supposed to serve — which, depending on your week, might be the scariest part.
If that's a no for you, no hard feelings, and skip this one. If your shoulders just went up a little — yeah. This is the book.
Why the book is free right now
Straight answer: because it's the first book in a series, and the best way I know to introduce a series is to take the price off the front door.
The Everett Exorcism is Book 1 of three in World of Shadows — Niccolo's story, then it widens out into Vatican conspiracy and inherited legacy as the series goes. The whole trilogy is finished and on Amazon. So if you read this one and the hooks land, the next two are right there. No waiting on me to write them. They're done.
That's the actual strategy, and I'd rather just tell you than pretend it's pure generosity. A free first book is a handshake. You risk nothing, you read a complete novel, and if my stuff isn't for you, you've lost a few evenings and we part as friends. If it is for you, you've found a series — and probably an author whose other shelves are worth a look.
I'd rather earn a reader that way than sell a stranger a thing they're not sure about.
What the series turns into
I'll keep this spoiler-free, because Book 1 stands completely on its own — you can read The Everett Exorcism, close it satisfied, and never pick up another page if you don't want to. The town's story finishes inside the town.
But the thing underneath it doesn't.
World of Shadows is three interconnected books, and the throughline is the rot inside the institution — that idea that some demons possess bodies and others possess the people in charge of fighting them. Book 1 is the exorcism and the conspiracy's first thread. From there it pulls outward: deeper into Vatican politics, into the question of who Arthur Vangeest really works for, and eventually into what gets inherited when men like these die and leave their war to someone else. Faith as a weapon. The cost of picking it up. Cassocks worn by the wrong things.
The reason I can tell you any of this is that all three are written and live on Amazon right now. I'm not dangling a series I haven't finished. The free book is the door; the hallway behind it is fully built. That matters to me as a reader — I've been burned by series that stalled out — so I won't do it to you.
There's a craft note buried in why this one became the free book and not another. The Everett Exorcism is the cleanest single entry point I've written. One priest, one town, one impossible question, a complete arc. If I'm going to take the price off something and ask a stranger to spend an evening with me, it should be the book that best represents the work — not the cheapest one to give away, the truest one. This is it.
How to grab it — and the one thing to watch
The window is July 1 through July 5, 2026. Five days. After midnight on the 5th it goes back to its normal price, so if you want it free, get it inside the window.
It's a Kindle ebook. You don't need a Kindle device — the free Kindle app on your phone, tablet, or computer reads it fine. Click through, make sure the price says $0.00 before you hit buy (free promos can take an hour or two to flip live at the very start of the window — if it still shows a price early on July 1, give it a little time and check back).
And if you're a Kindle Unlimited member, you can read it on KU any time — but during these five days you can own it free, which is the better deal. Grab the copy.
One ask, and it's the only one: if you read it and you have thirty seconds, leave a review. Doesn't have to be an essay. A star rating and a sentence about whether the priest's crisis of faith worked for you does more for a book like this than any ad I could buy. Reviews are how the next reader finds it.
A little about the rest of what I do
If you're new here, The Everett Exorcism is one corner of a bigger sandbox.
I write across a few series — horror, thrillers, and some sprawling apocalyptic stuff under the World on Fire banner. And I build voice games for Alexa, which is the other half of my week. If you like dark, atmospheric, choice-driven horror, that side might scratch the same itch the books do — same instinct for dread, different medium. The next time you're near an Echo, "Alexa, open Darkness Falls" will get you a taste: it's a survival-horror text adventure you play entirely by voice, and it runs on the same wiring as the books — bad odds, worse choices, and the feeling that something is paying attention.
But start with the free book. That's the easy yes.
Father Paladina drove into Everett hoping there was nothing in that town. There was something in that town. For five days in July, you can find out what it was for free.
The rosary burned the demon. The demon laughed. God stayed silent. Niccolo had to decide what to do in that silence — and so, eventually, will you.
Grab The Everett Exorcism between July 1 and July 5. I hope it keeps you up a little.
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