Suicide Flats

There have always been rumors about the dead place in the city of Fortune: a vast circle where nothing grows known as Suicide Flats. It’s a place where people go to die. Where dark shadows emerge at night, denied by the government that pretends it has no presence in Fortune. Where you can feel the pull of something not-quite-right, drawing lost souls to once-beautiful Cecret Lake at its center — a lake that one day eight years ago turned black as ink.

Officially, Fortune is an anomaly. Yet scientist Eldon Porter knows what the secretive agency GEN knows but hasn’t divulged to the public: Suicide Flats is a thin spot between our plane of existence and another. That other plane is a realm of heat and sulfur — a place without an official name, though even the scientists call it by its unofficial one: Hell. 

Minister Callum MacReady has run out of faith. His son is dying, and every week he stands in front of his congregation and tells them lies so that they — not he — can feel better. He tells the people of Fortune that God has a plan. That life is joyous. But as young Nathan worsens, Callum knows the truth: There is no plan. There is only grief and pain. 

But one day, when Callum finds himself in Suicide Flats at the shore of the ochre lake, he suddenly finds that he feels no pain at all. His worst thoughts and feelings have inexplicably left him … siphoned away, it seems, by a hungry and malevolent being waiting on the other side of a rift between worlds — a rift that’s been lurking beneath Cecret’s black water for centuries, just waiting for a reason to open. 

As Hell opens wide and demons rise, Eldon and Callum find themselves in a race against time. Fortune is the world’s canary … but soon enough, under the onslaught of unholy creatures, Fortune is destined to fall. 

Suicide Flats is a stand-alone novel in the world of Gore Point by artisan author Johnny B. Truant: a terrifying and unsettlingly beautiful ride into the mouth of chaos.