Monsters in My Mind

By Nick Oliveri

Deal Ends: Wed 28th October

Optioned for feature-film adaptation.Michael Conifer is quiet, anxious, observant, and almost never alone.Rachel Kalopoulos is beautiful, guarded, lonely, and far less untouchable than she appears.Inside Michael’s head lives Beel: a monster with charm and an answer for everything. Beel turns classrooms into arenas, glances into accusations, silence into proof, and desire into shame. He protects Michael. Michael says so himself.Rachel has Estelle. Around them, parents, teachers, students, powerful men, wounded women, and ordinary people moving through ordinary days reveal private cognitions beneath what appears to be there.As Michael and Rachel are drawn toward each other, their story becomes a dark study of adolescence, obsession, family, fear, and loneliness. All the while, perception seeps through ordinary days: people construct one another from fragments, shame alters reality, pain disguises itself as protection, and a voice can become a worldview.And of course, murder strikes amid a political campaign. Intersecting accounts trace the making of two mysterious families and converge around the crime, giving the novel the gathering momentum of a thriller.But the monster does not stay neatly inside the people of the book. It begins to shape the book itself, then reaches for the reader.Who is dangerous? Who is pathetic? Who is guilty? Who is forgivable? How much of another person can ever be known, and how much is invented from partial evidence?Unnerving, polarizing, darkly intimate, and deliberately intense, Monsters in My Mind is psychological literary fiction for readers drawn to fractured minds and the stories they tell themselves.