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 Blindside 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.
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