Book One · Synopsis and excerpt
The Fire: synopsis and an excerpt from Chapter Three
What happens when a family running toward a better life discovers that the most dangerous thing on the road is the truth they brought with them.
The synopsis
It is 1959. Sarah and David Lane leave Augusta, Georgia with their young son, bound for Pittsburgh. Like so many Black families of their generation, they are going north for work, for room to breathe, for a future that the South has spent their whole lives refusing them.
They do not get there whole. On a Kentucky highway, tragedy fractures the family, and the journey becomes something else: a passage through grief, through the silences a marriage depends on, and through history that refuses to stay in the past.
Waiting in that darkness is Ayama'tu, a supernatural presence whose obsidian face reflects buried truths. What the Lanes see in it, about each other and about themselves, may cost them more than the road already has.
The Man From Outside Light: The Fire is the first book in Anthony D. Martinez's Witness Trilogy: a historical horror novel about loss, reckoning, and the price of finally being seen.
Why it unsettles
The Fire does not need to invent the danger of a Black family on Southern and border-state roads in 1959; that danger is documented history. The supernatural enters on top of it, which gives the horror a double floor. Readers who come for the dread of the unknown stay for something heavier: the dread of what is already known, and unsaid.
Excerpt · Chapter Three
Borrowed ground
They buried Jacob in borrowed ground three miles outside of Harlan County, in a plot that belonged to a man named Ezekiel Tate who had never met the Lanes but who had buried enough Black children to know not to ask questions.
Sarah did not cry at the funeral. She stood at the edge of the grave with her hands flat at her sides and her eyes locked on the pine box and she thought, very clearly: He will never have to be afraid again.
It was the first time she had ever thought something so terrible that it made her stomach turn. And it was the truest thing she had ever felt.
Book details
At a glance
- Title
- The Man From Outside Light: The Fire
- Author
- Anthony D. Martinez
- Series
- The Witness Trilogy, Book One
- Publisher
- Urban Sixties Media
- Genre
- Historical horror
- Setting
- Augusta, Georgia to Pittsburgh, 1959
- Formats
- Paperback $25.99 · Hardcover $35.99
Keep a light on
Hear first when The Blood draws near.
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