Crazy Time: A Bizarre Battle with Darkness and the Divine

Crazy Time: A Bizarre Battle with Darkness and the Divine is a literary horror novel, a dark, surreal, contemporary supernatural fantasy that offers scares and suspense but seeks to terrify more on the level of concept, filling your head with thoughts and images that don’t fit right and perhaps shouldn’t even be.

Bright, independent Lily Henshaw rides home with her friends Kris, Eric, and Mia after an evening of celebration and ends up in a nightmare. Two men in a pickup truck stalk them on the road. The truck sideswipes them, and they pull over—where the two men subdue them with a gun and a tire iron. One of the men announces that it’s “crazy time,” and a game of violence and murder begins. Lily barely escapes with her life.

Months later, she is still traumatized, and her religious coworker Vince’s attempt to comfort her with claims that everything happens for a reason only leads to a panic attack. Her boss and the owner of the printing company where they work, Burt—who has always had feelings for her but has never acted on them—offers more solace, but he also shows her posters ordered by MFS, a corporation with offices at the nearby 1500 Spring Street skyscraper, posters that feature disturbing, apocalyptic Biblical images coupled with bizarre motivational taglines. Lily is agnostic, Burt is an atheist, and they’re both amused… and a little creeped out. The small levity Lily finds vanishes when her family calls to tell her that her brother David has killed himself, apparently part of a “cluster suicide” phenomenon that she and David had heard about on the news at a recent family gathering.

While she mourns, Lily can’t get the apocalyptic posters out of her head. Soon she gets a new, much larger dose of religious creepiness when a swarm of locusts invades her apartment. Unsure about whether the affliction is real, she calls Burt for help and waits for him outside. During the wait, a man attacks her. She is on the ground bleeding when Burt and other witnesses arrive. The other witnesses, seeing Burt, a black man, and Lily, an injured white woman, assume Burt is to blame and have him arrested. Lily testifies to Burt’s innocence, but he nevertheless spends a night in jail, where a cellmate kills himself, part of another suicide cluster. Meanwhile, Lily has a vision of Kris, Eric, and Mia sounding less like themselves than like Biblical prophets, warning her about opposing God. The experience sparks an idea: Lily begins to believe that she might be cursed, and in high Biblical fashion, the curse is affecting people around her, too, especially Burt.

Lily adopts “curse logic” and looks for answers. Burt, though skeptical, joins her. They visit an “extreme” psychic. Lily has an interview with a Satanist. While searching for answers, tragedies and traumas keep piling up: Lily’s family suffers more losses, Lily and Burt witness a murder in Lily’s bedroom as well as a suicide on the street, and Lily experiences further financial catastrophe. Lily concludes that her curse is reminiscent of the Book of Job. God, if He exists, is out to get her, and unlike the pious Job, she decides that she’s out to get God, too.

Her Satanist advisor points her toward a freelancer in the world of dark deeds, Tobias Centurion, who performs a ritual that points to answers at 1500 Spring Street. Armed with nothing but portents and vague advice, Lily and Burt approach the skyscraper intending to face off with God’s corporate cronies and possibly God Himself.