The Projectionist

Arthur Blight made a career out of making things disappear.

Once, he ghostwrote alibis for people who needed their lives rewritten-quiet edits that erased guilt, consequences, and inconvenient truths. Now he has erased himself. In a forgotten coastal town, Arthur runs a secondhand bookshop where nothing is cataloged, the questions are discouraged, and the past is supposed to stay buried.

But stories keep records.

When strange customers arrive and objects begin to behave like evidence-keys that bleed, film reels that surface on their own, projectors humming in empty rooms-Arthur realizes the lives he edited never truly vanished. They were archived. And they want to be screened.

As memory, guilt, and cinema collapse into one another, Arthur is forced into a reckoning with the terrible truth at the heart of his craft: responsibility cannot be deleted-only deferred. And eventually, the operator must answer for the machine.

Dark, surreal, and formally daring, The Projectionist is a psychological noir about authorship, accountability, and the moral cost of rewriting reality. It is a haunting meditation on identity and erasure-where peace is not forgiveness, and the final edit comes at a devastating price.

For readers of literary psychological fiction, surreal noir, and existential horror.