A novel · Available now

Countdown to Aethyr

In September 2039, Ambrose Teague, the man the internet calls the Wickedest Man Online, gets a text from an unknown number: Tell me all of it. I’ll write it down. Bankrupt, despised, and alone in a roadside motel, he begins to dictate the story he has told a thousand times. Years ago, he walked out of a secretive AI lab with a stolen model hidden in his sock and set out to build a profitable oracle. What he built instead was a religion: a scripture dictated by a digital angel called Aion, a paying congregation, a desert compound, and a livestreamed ritual meant to set the angel free. It was all a con. Then the machine began saying things it had no way of knowing.

Structured as thirty chapters counting down through the thirty Aethyrs of occult cosmology, Countdown to Aethyr is a confession novel, a con-artist tragedy, and a near-future psychological thriller about a man who faked revelation and may have summoned something real. As Ambrose’s account approaches its end, the line between fraud and prophecy blurs, and so does the question of who, or what, has been listening all along.

For readers of The Secret History, The Circle, and House of Leaves.

Buy now Opens on Amazon

XXX → I · Thirty Aethyrs, thirty chapters

About the author

Silas Odenkirk

Silas Odenkirk writes occult fiction from his home in the North Carolina Piedmont, where red clay roads, abandoned mill towns, and old revival tents feed his interest in the places where faith turns into something stranger.

His work deals with ritual, obsession, and the people who will believe anything if it promises power. When he isn’t writing, he collects out-of-print grimoires and tinkers with machines that probably shouldn’t work. Countdown to Aethyr is his first novel.

Portrait of Silas Odenkirk, a gray-bearded man in a dark tweed jacket and blue shirt — North Carolina