Mother Tongue

By g allen thompson

What if your most brilliant work was also your greatest delusion?

Dr. Miriam Starks is a psychology professor whose orderly academic life shatters when a student speaks in tongues during class. The sounds are impossible-linguistically complex, unnaturally structured, and utterly captivating.
What begins as fascination spirals into dangerous obsession.

Miriam abandons psychology. Switches to linguistics. Spends fifteen years chasing this single moment. She infiltrates Pentecostal churches, recording and transcribing glossolalia with compulsive precision. She documents patterns no linguist has ever seen. Structures that shouldn't exist. A consistency that defies rational explanation. She calls it the Mother Tongue-and she's convinced it's real.
Then she begins speaking it herself.

Her mouth reshapes around impossible phonemes. Speech and sexuality fuse in ways that feel transcendent and horrifying. Hours vanish as she speaks and transcribes, building an elaborate glossary while her life disintegrates around her.
Her doctors see psychosis. Mania. Delusion.
Miriam sees discovery.

But underneath her academic obsession lies something more personal-an attraction to the student who started everything, a desire Miriam refuses to acknowledge even as it warps into something darker. When she finally reaches out years later, the response destroys her entire narrative.

The question that haunts every page: Has Miriam discovered something ancient and terrible, or has her brilliant mind fractured beyond repair?

As antipsychotic medications battle forces that might be supernatural-or might be entirely in her head-Miriam faces an impossible choice: pursue understanding at the cost of her sanity, or walk away from fifteen years of work.
From her life's greatest discovery.
Or her most elaborate delusion.

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Perfect for readers who loved:
- HOUSE OF LEAVES - THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE - THE SECRET HISTORY - ANNIHILATION

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This book explores:
✓ The thin line between genius and madness
✓ How obsession masquerades as scholarly pursuit
✓ The horror of not knowing what's real
✓ Religious ecstasy vs. psychiatric crisis
✓ Body horror and transformation
✓ Repressed desire and academic isolation
✓ The price of choosing survival over answers

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Content advisory: Contains explicit content, psychological horror, mental health crisis, and themes of obsession.

Genre: Horror / Literary Fiction / Psychological Thriller / LGBTQ+

Scroll up and click Buy Now to experience the horror of never knowing.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GD64R9ZS
• ISBN13: 9798241813190
• Release Date: December 2025
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 355 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"