The Muse Asylum

“An ingeniously plotted postmodernist mystery. . . . David Czuchlewski writes with imagination, vision, and style.”—Joyce Carol Oates

Who is Horace Jacob Little, and what is he trying to hide?

Legend has is that not even his agent had met him, that they communicated via post office box. Horace Jacob Little had insisted on blank covers for all his books. . . . No one knew what he looked like or where he lived. . . . I used to imagine him: a death-row inmate, a mild-mannered accountant, a disfigured cripple. . . .

He was none of these, as it turned out, nothing my imagination could conjure.

Andrew Wallace, recent Princeton graduate and troubled genius, spends his days in the Overlook Psychiatric Institute—the Muse Asylum—writing about a dark conspiracy against him engineered by the elusive author Horace Jacob Little. When fellow classmate Jake Burnett, a novice reporter, arrives on the hospital grounds to visit Andrew, he learns that Andrew’s problems run much deeper than simple paranoia and obsession.

Along with Lara Knowles, the girl they both love, they try to break through the shadows of the enigmatic Horace Jacob Little. Instead, they find themselves caught in a twisted game of reflections and reversals, where each seems to be pursuing the other—for love, for success, or for a far more sinister purpose.

“[A] cleverly devised, sharply composed, entertaining and moving novel.”—The Wall Street Journal