Most people move through the world assuming what they see and feel lines up with everything around them. But for Aubrey Shallcross, that’s never quite been the case. There’s always been something else present, something that doesn’t go away, even as his life continues forward. The Hearing Voices Series by Charles Porter follows how that difference shapes everything that comes next.
Aubrey Shallcross has always relied on instinct to navigate the voices in his head, learning when to listen, when to ignore, and when to act, even without certainty.
That instinct starts to matter more when the world around him begins to shift.
In the South Florida wetlands, tension builds between land, development, and survival. What begins as observation turns into involvement, and Aubrey finds himself pulled into situations that demand action, whether he fully understands them or not.
The voices don’t give him clear answers. They push, suggest, and redirect.
And when he follows them, the consequences don’t stay contained.
As events unfold, the scale of what he’s part of grows, moving beyond personal decisions into something larger, where every choice leaves a mark that can’t be erased.
What if the voice in your head wasn’t something to silence — but something to understand?
The Hearing Voices series by Charles Porter is not fantasy, and it is not about the supernatural.
It is a work of literary fiction rooted in lived experience — a sustained exploration of what it means to hear voices, and to build a life around that reality.
Across five interconnected novels, readers follow Aubrey Shallcross, a man whose inner world does not align neatly with what others would call “normal.” He works, he loves, he forms relationships, and he navigates the landscapes of South Florida and beyond — all while living with voices that shape how he experiences the world.
Each book deepens that perspective:
The Blindspot Cathedral introduces a life lived alongside voices
Flame Vine returns to the instability of earlier years
Animal Slippers expands outward into action and consequence
The Underwater Panthers widens the lens to community and conflict
Painted Birds moves into memory, history, and unresolved questionsRather than offering easy answers, the series stays with the complexity of perception itself — how it forms, how it shifts, and how it can still hold together a meaningful life.
This is not a story about illness alone.
It is a series about identity, consciousness, and the uneasy space between what we accept as real and what we don’t yet understand.
Enjoy an Excerpt from The Blindspot Cathedral
In Miami, a woman gripped the dresser with one hand. In her other, she held the cross at the end of a rosary between her legs while a red-haired man named Carlos stood naked behind her staring at the time and date written in lipstick on her back: 7:30 p.m., August 21, 1986.
Carlos saw a line of heat lightning outside to the north and looked down at the clock on the dresser to time his moment to the moment he thought she was ovulating. When the second hand was twenty away from what it said in the lipstick, he tried harder, bringing him as close to 7:30 as he could. The woman pulled slow on the cross, dragging the rosary bead by bead out of his body as he strained to recite a palindrome, “No, son! Onanism’s a gross orgasm sin—a no- no, son.”
One hundred miles up the coast, another man, Aubrey Shallcross, leaned over the sink in his bathroom and pulled on something, too—a sliver of meat between his teeth. When he was young with milk teeth, he was teased at swimming lessons over the dark moles on his body, so his devout Catholic grandmother told him a grandmother story to anneal his child confidence. She said the moles were the tops of angels’ heads, guardian types, and he was especially lucky because most children have only one angel, but he had many, if you read the moles right.
The boy, Aubrey, chose a peppercorn-looking thing in his left armpit as his first-string seraph and secret friend, then in his mind, changed the mole into a three-inch-tall man in a three-piece suit like the one his father wore to Mass. He named the little man Triple Suiter.
Unrelated to this, Aubrey went on to develop what Western society calls schizophrenia.
About the Author: Charles Porter is the author of the award-winning Hearing Voices series, a collection of literary novels rooted in the lived experience of hearing voices.
Rather than approaching the subject clinically, Porter explores it through story — examining how people build full, complex lives while navigating forms of perception often misunderstood or labeled as disorder. His work engages with questions around consciousness, culture, and the boundaries of what we consider typical human experience.
The first novel in the series, Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral, was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014, with later titles also receiving critical recognition.
Porter divides his time between Florida and Massachusetts, where he works with horses and continues to write.
For more information, visit his website.
Buy the series at Amazon.
Have you ever wondered how your favorite songs really began?
From Munich’s vibrant core, Intensia is sparking a poetic, tuneful movement with a unique glimpse into her evolving pop songs-to-be book, “WORDS TO THINK. OR TO SING.”. It combines lyric snippets with heartfelt reflections, inviting readers to discover her art in progress in a new and unexpected way.
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
TAMANRASSET is historical fiction set on the edge of the Sahara as the ancient world begins to fade and great empires collide. Four strangers—a mature Foreign Legionnaire, a Sharif’s wrathful son, an ambitious American archaeologist, and an abandoned Swedish widow—become adrift and isolated, but when their paths intersect, the fragile connections between them tell a story of survival and fate on the edge of the abyss. Blending the sweep of classic adventure with the horror of a great historical calamities, Edward Parr’s TAMANRASSET is a saga about the crossroads where nomads meet.
Edward (“Ted”) Parr studied playwriting at New York University in the 1980’s, worked with artists Robert Wilson, Anne Bogart, and the Bread and Puppet Theater, and staged his own plays Off-Off-Broadway, including Trask, Mythographia, Jason and Medea, Rising and an original translation of Oedipus Rex before pursuing a lengthy career in the law and public service. He published his Kingdoms Fall trilogy of World War One espionage adventure novels which were collectively awarded Best First Novel and Best Historical Fiction Novel by Literary Classics in 2016. He has always had a strong interest in expanding narrative forms, and in his novel writing, he explores older genres of fiction (like the pulp fiction French Foreign Legion adventures or early espionage fiction) as inspiration to examine historical periods of transformation. His main writing inspirations are Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Bernard Cornwell, Georges Surdez, and Patrick O’Brien.
Natural talent, hard work, and a childhood friend help LaVern Whitaker find her calling as an actress. When her life becomes overwhelming, they discover a small town where her true identity can remain unknown and she can stay out of the spotlight. The more she visits her secret getaway, the more deeply she feels connected to the history, the lifestyle, and the people. Could this place be her home away from home, or become the home she has dreamed of? Or will sinister forces rip it all away?
Have you ever wondered how your favorite songs really began?
From Munich’s vibrant core, Intensia is sparking a poetic, tuneful movement with a unique glimpse into her evolving pop songs-to-be book, “WORDS TO THINK. OR TO SING.”. It combines lyric snippets with heartfelt reflections, inviting readers to discover her art in progress in a new and unexpected way.
