Dusty Shoeman is a man on the brink—of madness, of revelation, and maybe even of literary fame. A construction worker by day and secret novelist by night, Dusty battles the chaos of teenage children, a strained marriage, and neighbors who redefine the word “pretentious.” His only escape? A hidden manuscript about Janet, a grieving single mother navigating a surreal therapy that leads her through five mysterious doors in search of healing after the loss of her son. 

But when Dusty’s private novel accidentally gains public attention, his carefully compartmentalized life implodes. 

Will his family support his unexpected creative side—or will they laugh him back into the closet? As Dusty’s fictional world collides with his real one, he must confront the question: Can a man rewrite his own story, or is he doomed to live under the Shoeman Curse forever? With equal parts humor and heartache, The Shoeman Curse is a dramedy about family, failure, and the fragile art of starting over. 

Perfect for readers who love their laughs laced with tears, this novel-within-a-novel delivers a poignant punch that lingers long after the final page. 

Some doors don’t just open.
They rewrite what you’re allowed to remember.

The Shoeman family expected a difficult trip to a remote Indonesian island. They did not expect to lose a child to a glowing doorway hidden beneath the roots of an ancient banyan tree.

When young Samara disappears into a collapsing ancestor realm, her father, Dusty Shoeman, does the one thing no parent should ever have to do—he follows her into a world where stories shape reality and memories can be stolen, traded, or erased entirely. There, a shape-shifting darkness feeds on fear and grief, learning his family’s faces as it hunts.

As Dusty battles the realm itself, Stella Shoeman and the children fight an escalating catastrophe in the physical world—earth splitting, villages falling, the island tearing apart beneath their feet. Rescue becomes survival. Survival becomes sacrifice.

To destroy the darkness, Dusty must write a counter-story strong enough to kill an ancient hunger. But victory comes at a cost no one can undo.

Dusty returns alive. But not whole.

With memories missing and identity fractured, the Shoemans must rebuild their husband, father, and life together—one choice, one story, one moment at a time.

Perfect for readers who love emotional speculative fiction with cinematic stakes, mysterious islands, and deeply human survival.

A standalone spin-off of The Shoeman Curse.

Dusty Shoeman thought he left Janet on the page. He was wrong.

When an old draft pulls her name back into his life, the house stirs—keys chatter by themselves, a voice he wrote starts answering back, and the lines between fiction and family blur. But this isn’t the lovable muse readers remember. Janet has changed—sharper, colder, hungry for the ending Dusty never gave her.

As the haunt tightens around his wife and kids, Dusty must face what he buried in that first book and close a door he never meant to open. With help from his oldest friend, Nathan Chessie, he’ll have to write an ending she can’t twist—before she steps off the page for good.

Perfect for readers who like a tense, character-driven thriller about creation, consequence, and the stories that won’t let us go.