Usual Monsters

Book excerpt: Jane Dalby is dying. The cancer has made its home inside her head, slowly sprouting malignant tumors on her brain. Tumors that sit on her optical nerves. Tumors that cause hallucinations of dark, horrible monsters. The doctors told her it’s all in her head, and that these monsters that plague her everyday life don’t actually exist. She is only imagining them—no matter how real they might seem. But when her husband is brutally murdered, and her niece goes missing, Jane finds herself in a kind of hell she couldn’t have imagined. Jane doesn’t have much time to find her niece. Her desperate search will lead her to the very edge of madness, and deep within the dark woods, she will come face-to-face with the monsters living in her head.