The Hollow Between Stars: A Gothic Psychological Science-Fiction Thriller

By Alla A. Kuskova

The first lie is that the visitor came from elsewhere.
The second is that we were waiting.

Mara Levent has made a career of tracing the seams where memory splits from truth. As a specialist in impossible recollections, she knows that the mind does not record - it reconstructs. It stitches together borrowed cloth and calls it a life.

But when Elias Thorne walks into her clinic with a photograph from 1987 - showing a woman who is unmistakably Mara, decades before her birth - her professional faith begins to crumble. The handwriting on the back is hers. The scar on the hand is hers. The place is Veysk, a northern installation that official maps pretend does not exist.

A cryptic summons from her estranged brother draws Mara north, into a tundra where the snow conceals perfect black circles cut into the earth. There, she discovers the truth: she is not a person, but a composite. A vessel built from the memories of the dead, filled over decades with the residue of other people's lives until the accumulation became a person who believed she was real.

Now the installation is failing. The patterns are degrading. And the dead - stored for forty years in tapes, files, and glass - are learning to choose their vessels.

Mara stands at the heart of a choice that will echo through the living and the dead: refuse the memories and become empty, or claim them and become full.

Because the dead do not need to be saved.
They only need someone willing to remember.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HJ8P2XJ4
• ISBN13: 9798172972423
• Release Date: September 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 106 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"