The Extractionist is live on Amazon. Here's what you're walking into.
I didn't set out to write a romantasy. I set out to find out what would happen if the somatic work I've been doing for nine years — the breathing, the fascia, the nervous system research — lived inside a love story instead of a protocol book.
What happened was Vesper Vane.
She's seventeen. She lives in the Warrens — the undercity beneath a civilization that files human consciousness the way we file tax returns. She steals memories from the dead for food money. She has eighteen spiral scars on her fingers, one for every extraction. And she breathes in the wrong direction.
She doesn't know why. She doesn't know that the pattern — four counts in, hold, six counts out — was given to her by a mother she never met.
Then she pulls a memory from a dead wine merchant and sees her own face.
Not hers exactly. Older. Thinner. Laughing in sunlight that doesn't exist in the Warrens, in a room that smells like ozone and something floral she has no name for.
That's where the book starts running.
The extraction puts Vesper at the center of something older than the Academy and older than the filing system that turned human memory into infrastructure. It also forces her into an alliance with Caelum Ashford — a filed Academy enforcer whose job is to hunt people like her, and whose body starts synchronizing with hers in ways neither of them asked for.
I call what I write somatic fiction. In these books, breath, scars, proximity, and the distance between two people's hands carry as much weight as dialogue. The almost-touch matters more than the kiss. The synchronized breathing matters more than the declaration. The 4-4-6 pattern in the book is real. Your body already knows what to do with it.
The fiction and my nonfiction research are two doors into the same room. But you don't need to walk through both. This one stands on its own.
The Extractionist is Book One of The Unfiled Trilogy. Available now in Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, and paperback.
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— Doug
P.S. — Jaxson does not appear in this book. He is now filing a class action lawsuit against the entire fiction catalog. His legal team consists of a squeaky toy and a grudge.