My newest novel, just completed, not yet “out,” features a lovely cast of ghosts, or “Polters,” as they call themselves.  Not poltergeists! Just Polters. They are offended if you think they haunt houses. “Decent Polters don’t haunt,” one of them says. “It’s demeaning, and it’s not who we are.”

My very-much-alive hero, Clay Redding, is a photographer in Portland, Oregon. Though he hasn’t died, he finds himself one night in Bardonia, a town not on any map, a community of Polters.  He has a difficult time understanding what it’s like to be a Polter. He faces a crisis when the head Polter, Pericles, asks for his help in migrating thousands of Polters into Portland.

It’s not a horror story. These are not scary ghosts. They’re just a different kind of person, the dead kind, and they can’t remember what it’s like to be alive.

Why ghosts?  Ghosts are the new aliens!  Yes. Pass the word.

My previous trilogy, the “Phane” series,  featured Phane and his green family from planet Vikos. The Alien psychology was a counterpoint to human psychology. That’s a technique to de-familiarize our ordinary view of life and make us reconsider. It takes an alien to understand a human!

Polters serve a similar function. They’re a lot like us, but different enough so that when you try to interact with them, your unexamined assumptions about being alive are revealed. Clay learns, for example, that there are no clocks in Bardonia, because when you’re dead, you’re never late for anything.

I’ll let my millions of ghostly readers know when Polters comes out, hopefully in Spring of 2023.

Meanwhile, see the Phane series: Use the Universal Book Links (UBL) or Amazon links below:

Alien Body

UBL: https://books2read.com/u/md1VBy

AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VWKRH75

Alien Panic: 

UBL: https://books2read.com/u/4jqvkk

AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08L5LBTJT

Alien Dream Machine:

UBL: https://books2read.com/u/bOn950

AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0916MWF45

And don’t forget about the Newcomers trilogy, when androids were the early aliens.

Reluctant Android: 

UBL: https://books2read.com/u/bOn9gE

AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07FBQTM9M

Alien Talk: 

UBL: https://books2read.com/u/mK6GnE

AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07LDJ4CHF

Intelligent Things: 

UBL: https://books2read.com/u/3LVX7M

AMZ: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QLNLS88