Book One of the trilogy
Please don't think me evil.
I'm far from that.
"Beautifully unsettling." Dr. Gina Gettings
August 2019. The Manassean Society, which fixed on 2020 by the turn of the millennium, gathers beneath the Las Vegas Strip. For decades it has nurtured the public's divisions through a network it secretly owns, deciding which voices are heard and which ones vanish. On the eve of the rite, its guide, Hiram, raises a glass to the birth and then says quietly: "Should the world refuse the mercy, there is the other way, and the other way does not ask the world's permission."
One of them has decided to talk to you.
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Please don't think me evil. I'm far from that.
The confession opens with a killing and does not apologize for it. Then it goes back to 1986: a phone ringing in a dorm TV lounge, a call meant for someone else, an oath sworn beneath Edinburgh Castle, and thirty years of answering to a name taken from scripture. You are asked to hear the whole story before you judge. You may end up understanding, and not like what that says about you.
The Manassean Society is fiction. The patterns, the author writes, are real.
Confession is Book One of the Don't Think Me Evil trilogy. Its companion, The Pattern Files, is an audiobook, free for a limited time. It ends with this book's first lines, and the story continues in Book Two, Snowman & Little Bird.
August 9, 2019
The summons came a year early.
"A golden seven-pointed star burning on a field of black."
From Confession, Chapter 4
The Saqqara and The CURIA
A pyramid of black glass, built over something far older.
At the end of the Strip, the Saqqara throws no reflection. Beside it, The CURIA rises in sixty floors of smoked glass and brushed gold. The Saqqara and The CURIA exist only in these pages.
Enter The CURIAListen and watch
From the world of Don't Think Me Evil
An audiobook, free for a limited time
The Pattern Files
Something is converging. Someone is listening back. A Louisiana professor, Asa Thibodeaux, records the patterns he notices between May 2019 and March 2020. It ends where Confession begins.
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The Music
Songs from the world of the book
Original music with lyrics by Elwood West. Look How I Shine, He Comes in Your Dreams, Rest and Be Ready, The Hard Way.
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The Books
Book Two · Expected early 2027
Snowman & Little Bird
Becoming
The one offer
The Pattern Files
An audiobook, free for a limited time, from the world of Don't Think Me Evil. It ends with the first lines of Confession.
Get the free audiobook
About the author
Elwood West
Elwood West began Don't Think Me Evil in the mid-1990s and began finishing it thirty years later, just prior to the pandemic lockdowns. The years between were spent in the executive ranks of a Fortune 500 company, in boardrooms across five continents, and in conversations he is not at liberty to describe. He has returned, after a lifetime away, to the city where the writing began: Houston.