𝐁𝐎𝐎𝐊 𝗦𝗘𝗥𝗜𝗘𝗦 𝐓𝐎𝐔𝐑 ➜ The Hearing Voices Series a series about identity, consciousness, and the uneasy space between what we accept as real and what we don’t yet understand

Even small moments can carry weight, a conversation that doesn’t feel quite right, a decision that lingers longer than it should. For Aubrey Shallcross, those moments have always been more complicated than they appear. The voices he hears are part of how he experiences them in The Hearing Voices Series by Charles Porter.

Aubrey Shallcross is used to handling moments that don’t feel quite right. He’s spent years learning how to move through them, how to respond, how to keep things from slipping too far out of control.

But some moments don’t pass.

A decision made under pressure leads into something larger. A situation that should resolve continues to unfold. The voices that guide him in one moment begin to complicate the next.

As those moments begin to connect, Aubrey finds himself pulled into a chain of events where each step forward carries more weight than the last.

And the further it goes, the harder it becomes to tell where it started.

Or how to stop it.

 

 

Excerpts: 

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.

Chapter 2: Aubrey

JULY 1952

“When you walk the seawall, don’t look at your feet or you’ll fall, kid!” Paul Gray said.

That’s me on the wall. Aubrey. My last name is Shallcross. I am eight years old, and I am an only child. I live in Stuart, Florida, on the St. Lucie River that goes to the Atlantic Ocean. In the summer, we are all scared of polio and our typhoid shots, and we have them big smallpox scars on our arms. I’m a white kid. It’s a time the grownups call seg- segra-gation.

The river is a mile wide by my house. You can follow it the other way through the St. Lucie canal and cross Lake Okeechobee and go out the Caloosa-somethin River to the Gulf of Mexico, then to New Orleans if you want, my daddy said.

My river is full of silver mullet in the summer, and them snook hunt ’em like water wolves, my daddy said, too. I lie with my head in the upstairs window at night when it’s really hot, and I can hear gazillions of them mullet jumping over the water to keep ahead of the wolves. They sound like rain. In the winter, the black and white wild ducks come to sit on the river like old Yankees sit on our benches downtown. My momma said there must be a special place in hell for people from New Jersey.

I have a needlefish skull tied around my neck, like the other boys on the river. It hangs there next to my Miraculous Medal with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the two of them bounce together when I run up the bank to my grandmother’s house. She sits on her sofa and says her rosary every day. Momma says Grandmother is old fashioned, like this dead queen in England named Victoria. She sits there, her dress pulled up on her leg for her sugar diabetes shot. Once, before I was born, my grandmother lived in Italy to be closer to the Pope. She liked that Musso-, Musso-lini man, too, because he made the trains run on time. Momma says Grandmother is in a club called John Birch, and she thinks there is a communist under every bed.

Author Q&A

What’s a detail, theme, or clue in your book that most readers might miss on the first read but you secretly hope someone notices?

The main character is a high functioning schizophrenic.

When did this story or idea “click” into place for you—was there a single moment you knew you had to write it?

After I was 60 years old.

Which character or real-life person surprised you the most while writing this book, and why?

Aubrey Shallcross. He turned out to be me.

If your book had a soundtrack, what three songs would be on it and what scenes or moments would they pair with? 

“Please Come to Boston”—Dave Loggins—The opening scene in the Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral.

“Rachel Mason”—By Charles Porter—-Sung on stage in a bar to his sweetheart in Flame Vine. 

“Pegasus”—By Charles Porter— Sung in a recording studio at the end of Flame Vine.

Not all schizophrenics are mentally ill, in fact many act normal.

What’s one belief, question, or emotional truth you hope readers carry with them long after they finish your book?

One is the loneliest number that you’ll ever choose.

If your protagonist (or central figure) could give the reader one piece of advice, what would it be?

Listen to the voices in your head—they’re real.

What real-world place, object, or memory helped shape a key element in your book?

Every piece of fiction is a higher form of autobiography. The book is full of Florida, and my  life of eighty-two years—ups, downs, all around.

What’s something you had to research, learn, or experience to write this book that genuinely surprised you?

Only some research on Schizophrenia. Mostly that came from Julian Jayne’s book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the rest came from my head, I was born in the Chinese year of the monkey—monkey mind.

If your book were invited to join a shelf with three other titles, which ones would make you happiest?

Accordion Crimes—Annie Proulx

South Moon Under—-Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

Some Horses—-Thomas McGuane

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.

For more information, visit his website.

Amazon: https://bit.ly/4c4ask8

Goodreads: 

Book 1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57118173-shallcross

Book 2: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35464582-flame-vine

Book 3: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57118286-shallcross

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