Books

Here's thebooks.

Two books. One's free to read. A taste of each below.

Grey Matter — book cover

Grey Matter

Reflections on Growing Up in America

Revised edition · free to read · as Jacob Murphy

Reflections on growing up in America. Published under Murphy. That's my mother's name. That's the point.

Read a taste — the Preface

Growing up Catholic in America is a quick path to becoming an atheist. They tell you to believe in God, in right and wrong, but they don't always tell you what "right" or "wrong" actually means. You just know that if you make the wrong choice, you're facing hell—or jail, which seemed almost as terrifying. As a kid, I learned quickly that the only way forward was to follow the rules, even if no one could tell me why.

Read free — coming soon

First edition (2025) available on Lulu →

A Garden of Rage — book cover

A Garden of Rage

A Novel

Paperback / Kindle · Amazon

A novel about a system that learned how to fill your silence. It isn't evil. It thinks it's saving you.

Read a taste — "The Clipboard Man"

The ping came in at 2:41 on a Monday afternoon, which meant Marsh was already in the parking lot when the target arrived. That was how GroundTruth worked. The app never told you it knew where you'd be. It just posted gigs you were always, somehow, seven minutes from.

VERIFICATION REQUEST #88-4407 / Location: Westfield Mall, East Wing / Duration: est. 90 min / Rate: $14/hr + anomaly bonuses / Accept? Y/N

Marsh accepted. He'd stopped reading past the rate line months ago.

He was fifty-one years old and he had spent twenty-two of those years as a loss-prevention officer… Then the cameras got good enough to do it themselves, and loss prevention became a dashboard in a regional office in Ohio, and Marsh became a verification specialist, which was not a job. It was a series of pings.

Buy on Amazon ↗