The Other Side of Normal (AETHAL Book 1)

ONE ACCIDENT CRACKED THE BARRIER. NOW BOTH WORLDS ARE BLEEDING.

Three years ago, Eli Voss lost his sister. His father lost everything.

While the rest of Collinsville moved on, Richard Voss disappeared into his garage and started building—a machine to reach the dead, to find the daughter the world told him was gone for good. The town calls him dangerous. Eli just calls him Dad, and quietly keeps the lights on, the food made, and the man alive.

Then one sleepless night, Eli finishes what his father started.

The machine wakes. And something in Eli wakes with it.

Now he can see the dead. Spirits no one else knows are there, layered over the ordinary streets of the town he’s lived in his whole life—and Eli is the only one who can cross to where they are. Some of them need help. Some of them don’t want any. And some of them have been watching him back.

With his best friend Marcus building impossible machines in a backyard shed, and Nadia—sharp, steady, the first person in three years to see him as something other than the boy whose sister died—pulling him toward a life he’d stopped letting himself want, Eli begins to understand what he’s becoming.

But the more he learns, the closer he comes to the thing humming beneath his town. Something old. Something patient. Something that has been waiting a very long time for a door like the one his father built.

AETHAL: Book One is a fast-paced, grounded supernatural drama perfect for fans of high-stakes tension, cinematic pacing, and multi-season mystery universes.