About This Volume
Imagine a world exactly like ours, with one difference. Your shadow tells the truth.
Not a metaphor. When you lie, your shadow doesn't. When you smile at someone you can't stand, the shape on the wall behind you leans away. When you want something you'd never say out loud, it reaches for it. You can control your face. You spend your whole life learning to control the thing on the floor, and most people get good enough to make it through a workday.
Most people.
So you learn the rules everyone learns. You don't take a first date somewhere bright. You interview for jobs in rooms with the blinds half drawn. You watch what your kid's shadow does before you believe a word out of their mouth. It's just how things are. It's the ocean you swim in, and you stop noticing the water.
Then you notice something small. A shadow that's a beat too still. A shadow pointing the wrong way. A shadow doing something the person it belongs to would never, ever do.
And you can't stop noticing it.
Every story in Cast starts there, with one ordinary life and one small wrong thing on the floor beside it. Nobody explains the shadows. Nobody ever has. You just live with them, and read them, and hope the one attached to you keeps your secrets a little longer than it wants to.
Read them somewhere the light is good.
A quiet-horror anthology. Cast.
