Jersey: The Compound That Reveals the Jersey Devil (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798257723940)

Charlie Vance has spent fifteen years reducing the worst things in the world to chemistry. As a forensic analyst for the DEA, he trusts what can be measured, cataloged, and explained. But when a new drug-known only as Jersey-lands on his bench, it refuses to behave. The compound is impossibly pure. It has no origin, no classification, and no match in any database. Then the sample disappears from evidence-checked out under Charlie's own signature at a time he knows he wasn't there.

As overdoses spread through the Pine Barrens, the survivors all describe the same impossible experience: a place beneath the trees, and something waiting there. Not hunting. Not moving. Watching. When Charlie begins to see it too-first in reflections, then at the edge of distance-he realizes the drug isn't causing hallucinations. It's removing a filter. It's letting people perceive something that has always been present... something tied to the land, the myth of the Jersey Devil, and a decades-old containment protocol that was never meant to fail.

Pulled into a hidden network that has been tracking-and limiting-those who can see, Charlie is forced to confront a truth that cannot be tested or contained. The more he understands the compound, the more it understands him. And as the line between observer and subject begins to collapse, Charlie must decide whether to stop the spread... or take the dose himself and cross the threshold completely-knowing that once you are seen, you are never unseen.

JERSEY: is a literary horror thriller about perception as exposure, myth as environment, and the moment you realize the world has been looking at you your entire life.

For readers of Annihilation, True Detective, and The Fisherman.