Adverse Reactions: A Novel of the Paranormal

When your mind makes you the enemy, either your mind must die, or you will. Unless yours is the mind they can't break.

Since she was six years old, Devin Perridin has been locked behind the walls of the family home to keep her hidden from those who would kill her. But at sixteen, she is exposed as a "Syke," one of an outlawed minority who possess extraordinary powers of mind over matter. Snatched from hiding, she escapes the firing squad, but only to be imprisoned in a house of horrors: the Peaceful Hills Sanatorium and Rehabilitation Center for the Treatment of Persistent Mental Disorders. After an unknown time of torture and "behavior modification," brutally designed to destroy her psychokinetic reflexes, she emerges from the asylum severely damaged in mind and spirit. Her salvation may lie in the series of crimes triggered by her release: first kidnapping, then attempted murder, and then a mustering of forbidden forces to assault the remote pseudo-psychiatric facility where she had been tortured into near-mindlessness.

Drawing upon a strength she had always known was hers but had never before been able to consciously control, Devin defies the authoritarian society with its unjust laws that demand her death. She pushes through pain, isolation, and moral quandaries to seek justice for not only herself, but all members of a maligned and cruelly persecuted minority. A post-apocalyptic, paranormal allegory for the times in which we live.

To be gifted in a world that demands conformity is to wage a battle between an individual's spirit and a crushing system. "Thematically rich, as Devin faces constant self-doubt but eventually comes to find empowerment in the unique abilities that have made her an outcast." —The Black List