A novel about a man's desire to deny closure, and the shocking conclusions he discovers about the world around him along the way.
Use this to give a tight logline. One or two sentences that capture what Cold Clarity is about, tonally and thematically.
What Cold Clarity is about
Adrian is a man no one sees—unemployed, unanchored, and erased by the world he once tried to belong to. When the weight becomes too much, he decides to disappear without a trace. He heads into the mountains, believing the wilderness will accept the pieces of him the city rejected. But as he pushes deeper into the cold, the journey becomes something stranger—an unraveling, a confrontation, a reckoning.
In the stillness of the high altitudes, Adrian stumbles onto truths he wasn’t looking for. The mountains hold answers he never thought he’d receive, and what he discovers there will alter the way he sees himself, and the world he thought he had abandoned.
Where this story lives
The world of Cold Clarity is carved out of mountains, silence, and the thin air of a man on the edge of vanishing. Its emotional weather shifts between stark isolation and sudden flashes of something stranger—moments when the wilderness feels less like a backdrop and more like a presence watching back. The story lives in abandoned towns and environmental ghosts, in long stretches of road where memory presses in, and in the vast, indifferent cold of higher altitudes where the world strips a person down to whatever truth survives.
It is a landscape shaped by dread and wonder in equal measure—where the familiar laws of the world seem to loosen, and every shadow on the treeline feels like it might carry a message. Mountains become mirrors. Silence becomes a test. And in that crucible, Adrian confronts the buried currents of grief, identity, and the unspoken question of why he really disappeared in the first place.
Influences drift through the novel like weather fronts: the haunted psychology of The Road, the psychological fracture of Notes From the Underground and Crime and Punishment, the cosmic unease of H.P. Lovecraft, the raw American vulnerability of Alice in Chains, and the melancholic beauty of Opeth. These echoes shape a world where every footstep deeper into the wilderness leads closer to a revelation—and farther from the life Adrian thought he was escaping.
The novel primarily takes place in the cold tundra of the Mountains. Ancient, indifferent, and planetary in their might. The ice freezes and strips away everything Adrian thought he might have known.
Cold Clarity deals with the consequences of both choice and nature. Of will and the constraints of reality. Of the spark within all of us and the cold impartiality of the world.
A page from the book
“You remind me of my son,” she said finally.
He looked up.
“He’s about your age,” she said. “Smart. Kind. Too sensitive for this godforsaken world. He hit a rough patch a few years back. Bad breakup. Money problems. Depression.” She exhaled. “And I wasn’t there for him the way he needed. Not because I didn’t care – God, I cared – but because I was drowning too. Bills, shifts, my own health going to hell…”
She rubbed the heel of her hand against her brow.
“When he finally told me how alone he’d felt, it broke something in me. Because I had no idea. I was so deep in my own mess I couldn’t see his.”
Her voice cracked slightly. She cleared it.
“And that’s when I realized something important…
People look indifferent only when they’re overwhelmed. They look like they aren’t all there.”
Adrian’s eyes lit up. He thought of the attendant yesterday.
“Like they’re dissociating…” he said reflexively.
“Yes!” She replied.
“And these days? Everybody’s overwhelmed.”
Adrian breathed slowly.
“I had a fiancee,” he said. “Years ago. She left. And I convinced myself it was because I wasn’t enough. Or because I was invisible. Or because I was easy to walk away from.”
Marge’s gaze softened.
“Maybe she loved you more than she could handle,” she said. “Maybe she was drowning. Maybe she didn’t know how to bring someone else into the storm she was barely surviving.”
He closed his eyes.
She let the silence settle.
“You’re blaming yourself,” she said. “You’re blaming them. You’re blaming everybody. But nobody was steering, Adrian. Not you. Not your fiancee. Not your friends. Not your parents. Not even that boy last night.”
He opened his eyes.
She continued:
“People don’t fail each other because they’re bad. They fail each other because they’re overwhelmed. Because this country – this world – throws too much at us. Too much stress. Too much loneliness. Too much damn noise. Everyone’s just reacting, trying to keep their own heads above water.”
She leaned back in her chair.
“You’re not the only one who feels invisible,” she said. “You’re just the only one honest enough to admit it.”
Where Cold Clarity is now
The novel is currently in the middle of its first full revision, per feedback from well-read confidants. The full draft has been submitted to them.