Per Meos Oculus: The War After

A Novel - Set for Publication in early 2027!

 

In the sleepless glow of motel signs, passing headlights, empty highways, suburban kitchens, neon barrooms, and silent stretches of coastline, a Marine who has somehow lived nearly twice as long as he ever expected drifts through the fractured terrain of memory, identity, fatherhood, morality, love, survival, and the unbearable weight of remaining alive after becoming psychologically prepared not to be.

 

Moving between emotional realism and surreal psychological dreamscape, the narrative explores what happens when the instincts required to survive never fully leave the body. Mission-oriented thinking collides with ordinary existence. Hyper-vigilance disguises itself as responsibility. Intimacy becomes both refuge and threat. Even something as mundane as passing beneath a highway overpass can awaken a quiet, irrational dread that never fully explains itself — only lingers, humming beneath the surface of otherwise normal American life.

 

Blending poetic prose, fragmented introspection, philosophical reflection, and cinematic atmosphere, the work traverses rain-soaked streets, late-night drives, hotel rooms, collapsing relationships, family moments, spiritual exhaustion, intrusive memories, nervous-system temporal fragmentation, existential bargaining, and the strange disorientation of trying to build a meaningful life inside a nervous system that once learned to survive by expecting death — and delivering it too.

 

At its core, this is not simply a story about war, love, or trauma.

It is a meditation on masculinity, guilt, tenderness, violence, faith, insecurity, self-preservation, conformity, and the invisible moral ledger human beings carry deep within themselves — the quiet accounting of whether the good they have done can ever truly outweigh the damage they carry.

 

Beautiful, corrosive, intimate, and deeply reflective, Per Meos Oculus: The War After exists somewhere between literary fiction, memoir, philosophical meditation, psychological horror, and confession. Memory behaves like a living organism. Conversations blur with hallucination. Desire mutates into mythology. Even silence begins to feel inhabited.

 

This is a story about consciousness surviving far beyond the point it ever believed it would.