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THE FIRST FACE is live! Kindle. Paperback.
The First Face
Vinny DeCarlo was hired to clean out a dead animation studio.
Simple job.
Dust. Boxes. Empty offices. Old walls.
Then he found the false wall.
Behind it was a steel door.
Behind that was a room nobody was supposed to find.
The hidden archive had been sealed away for decades. Religious research. Restricted images. Private notebooks. Witness accounts. Warnings. Records left by people who had seen something they could not explain—and could not agree on.
Some called it holy.
Others called it evil.
The archive called them Lamb and Beast.
Same image.
Same moment.
Two witnesses.
Two completely different faces.
Vinny should have closed the door.
Instead, he took the first box home.
Then he started putting the pieces together.
The deeper he goes, the stranger the archive becomes. Pages have been damaged. Records are out of order. Names appear where they should not. Witness accounts written decades apart begin repeating the same impossible details.
And buried beneath all of it is something older than the studio itself.
The First Face.
Not a monster.
Not a ghost.
A face.
And once Vinny understands what people have been seeing, he makes an even bigger mistake:
He makes the hidden archive understandable.
What had survived for generations as scattered pages, damaged records, and frightened testimony now has an order.
A route.
Something another person can follow.
Then a familiar face from television enters the story—and what was hidden behind one wall threatens to become something millions of people can see.
The First Face is a dark supernatural thriller about forbidden images, faith, fame, secrecy, and the terrifying possibility that two people can look at exactly the same thing and see completely different truths.
Some secrets stay buried because nobody finds them.
Others are buried because somebody already did.
Read it with the lights on.
THE SOFT SPOT IS LIVE! KINDLE! PAPERBACK!
The Soft Spot
The Soft Spot looked clean.
White paper on the tables. Hot coffee. Desserts under glass. A respectable little restaurant tucked behind a theater.
That was the front of the house.
Vinny DeCarlo learned what was behind it before his first shift was over.
The owner smiled while problems disappeared. The chef ruled the kitchen through fear. Regulars put their hands where they didn’t belong. Waitresses cried in service stations, fixed their faces, and went right back to pouring coffee.
Nobody stopped anything.
They managed it.
Just enough to keep the restaurant open for another shift.
Then the customers went home.
The doors locked.
Beer came out. Cocaine hit the tables. Affairs stopped pretending to be secrets. People disappeared into storage rooms and back halls while everyone else learned when not to look.
The restaurant had a soft spot in the floor.
It had a lot more than one.
Vinny watches all of it and tells himself the same thing over and over:
I’m different.
He is disgusted by the men who hurt people and the people who let them get away with it. He hates the silence. The excuses. The smiles afterward.
And when somebody crosses a line, Vinny wants him to answer for it.
At first, that sounds almost noble.
Then Vinny starts looking for lines to cross.
A stranger mouths off. A bottle finds bone. Somebody frightens a waitress, and Vinny borrows her fear as an excuse to hurt him. The anger he used to leave at work starts following him through Stamford—and eventually Vinny realizes the restaurant is not turning him into anything.
It is giving the worst part of him a place to practice.
Only Hannah seems to understand what is happening.
She tries to keep Vinny from the room.
Then she tries to keep the room from Vinny.
She cannot do both.
Every shift gets uglier.
Every excuse gets easier.
And eventually Vinny stops waiting for somebody else to clean the place up.
By then, the doors are locked.
The lights are out.
And everybody still inside The Soft Spot is about to find out what Vinny has been practicing for.
The Soft Spot is a dark psychological thriller about complicity, rage, corruption, violence, and a man who convinces himself that being disgusted by monsters means he cannot become one.
Some rooms are not haunted.
They are staffed.
THE SPIRALIZER is live! Kindle! paperback!
The Spiralizer
THE SPIRALIZER
Vinny DeCarlo has spent his life knowing when something bad is coming.
Not predicting it.
Feeling it.
A pressure behind his eyes. A low hum. A certainty that arrives when something deadly has already been set in motion and there is nothing left to do but wait for the world to catch up.
As a child, Vinny thinks it might be coincidence.
Then people die.
Years pass. Vinny gets married. Starts a family. Builds an ordinary life. The pressure never completely leaves him.
Then the news starts talking about missing people.
Four bodies have been found in different parts of the county. No obvious connection. No witnesses. No suspect.
Only the condition of the bodies.
Spiral-cut.
The press gives the killer a name.
The Spiralizer.
Vinny hears it and feels something worse than fear.
Recognition.
The police profile does not help.
Middle-aged white male.
Local.
Organized.
Comfortable with routine.
Able to look stable.
Maybe married.
Maybe employed.
Vinny turns off the television.
His hands are shaking.
Because lately there have been other things too.
Missing time.
Places he does not remember going.
Smells on his clothes he cannot explain.
Dreams of concrete floors covered in measurements.
And a building by the river that feels familiar long before he remembers why.
Vinny has spent years believing the pressure was warning him about death.
He was wrong.
It was never telling him what was coming.
It was telling him where he belonged in what was already happening.
And when the missing pieces finally return, Vinny is forced to confront a possibility his mind has worked very hard to keep buried:
Maybe he has not been sensing The Spiralizer.
Maybe he has been The Spiralizer all along.
But discovering the truth does not end the nightmare.
Because behind the murders is something colder than rage and harder to destroy than one killer.
A process.
A business.
A family.
And a system built around the simple fact that people rarely ask enough questions about something that appears clean, useful, and good for the ones they love.
The Spiralizer is a dark psychological horror thriller about missing time, buried memory, family loyalty, and a man discovering that the monster he has feared for years may have been living his life when he was not looking.
The worst part is not finding out who The Spiralizer is.
It is finding out the work can continue without him.
PROOF IS LIVE! KINDLE! PAPERBACK!
PROOF
In Vinny DeCarlo’s world, no one is honored while they are alive.
Recognition changes behavior. Praise distorts motive. So the Legacy Accolades Archive waits until death, then records only what can be proven.
Vinny trusts the system.
Then his father dies.
Vincent DeCarlo Sr.
Verified Contributions: 12.
Clean. Reasonable. Final.
Until Vinny opens a storage unit and finds a card catalog containing six hundred names—people his father helped before their lives became measurable.
People who almost quit.
People who almost disappeared.
People who needed one more conversation. One more chance. Ten more minutes.
The Archive counted what those people eventually accomplished.
It just never counted the man who helped them get there.
Now Vinny has to confront a flaw in a system he still believes in:
What if the record is accurate—and still misses the truth?
PROOF is a speculative novella about fathers and sons, legacy, invisible labor, and the people whose greatest contribution may be helping someone else survive long enough to make one of their own.
Some lives leave proof.
Others leave people.