Most people don’t question whether what they’re experiencing is reliable. It’s something taken for granted in everyday life. For Aubrey Shallcross, that certainty has never been there. The voices he hears have always shaped how he understands the world around him in The Hearing Voices Series by Charles Porter.

Aubrey Shallcross has learned to act without full certainty, to make decisions in moments where understanding doesn’t come first.

That way of moving through the world has worked, until it doesn’t.

Patterns begin to emerge in the events around him. Situations that once felt separate start to connect. The voices remain constant, but what they seem to be pointing toward becomes harder to ignore.

As those connections build, Aubrey is drawn deeper into events that feel less like coincidence and more like something unfolding.

And the closer he gets to understanding it, the more unstable everything becomes.

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Excerpt

Chapter 1: The Blue Goose

In Miami, a woman gripped the dresser with one hand. In her other, she held the cross at the end of a rosary between her legs while a red-haired man named Carlos stood naked behind her staring at the time and date written in lipstick on her back: 7:30 p.m., August 21, 1986.

Carlos saw a line of heat lightning outside to the north and looked down at the clock on the dresser to time his moment to the moment he thought she was ovulating. When the second hand was twenty away from what it said in the lipstick, he tried harder, bringing him as close to 7:30 as he could. The woman pulled slow on the cross, dragging the rosary bead by bead out of his body as he strained to recite a palindrome, “No, son! Onanism’s a gross orgasm sin—a no- no, son.”

One hundred miles up the coast, another man, Aubrey Shallcross, leaned over the sink in his bathroom and pulled on something, too—a sliver of meat between his teeth. When he was young with milk teeth, he was teased at swimming lessons over the dark moles on his body, so his devout Catholic grandmother told him a grandmother story to anneal his child confidence. She said the moles were the tops of angels’ heads, guardian types, and he was especially lucky because most children have only one angel, but he had many, if you read the moles right.

The boy, Aubrey, chose a peppercorn-looking thing in his left armpit as his first-string seraph and secret friend, then in his mind, changed the mole into a three-inch-tall man in a three-piece suit like the one his father wore to Mass. He named the little man Triple Suiter.

Unrelated to this, Aubrey went on to develop what Western society calls schizophrenia.

About the Author

Charles Porter is the author of the award-winning Hearing Voices series, a collection of literary novels rooted in the lived experience of hearing voices.

Rather than approaching the subject clinically, Porter explores it through story — examining how people build full, complex lives while navigating forms of perception often misunderstood or labeled as disorder. His work engages with questions around consciousness, culture, and the boundaries of what we consider typical human experience.

The first novel in the series, Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral, was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014, with later titles also receiving critical recognition.

Porter divides his time between Florida and Massachusetts, where he works with horses and continues to write.

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