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When I started college I was diagnosed with severe dilated cardiomyopathy, with an ejection fracture of about 30%. The doctors suggested I might want to consider dropping out of college and living life because I probably wouldn’t have much longer. I was assigned to a physician that handles terminal cases and closely monitored; due to other medical complications, a heart transplant was out of the question and medications had little effect. I ultimately decided to stay in college and pursue my goals and continue learning because that’s how I wanted to spend my life—I figure anyone can die at any time, so there’s no point in moping just because I know my odds of a long life weren’t as high as my peers’.

Needless to say, this affected my outlook on life and I took notice of these changes in perspective. The way I perceived the world around me had been forever altered, and through this new lens I began watching other people. I noticed many people hold themselves back in fear of failure, past adversities they’re unable to mentally surmount, or other barriers they could overcome if they chose to look beyond the mental barriers they created for themselves and work to resolve their underlying problems. It was a frustrating and sad sight to see, and from this observation The Simplest Maze was born.

I set out to write a thriller that would illustrate these common fears/anxieties that all too many people encounter throughout their lives, but often never face and overcome. I wanted a story that illustrated how people can lose themselves and slowly drown in surmountable problems—such as doubt, fear, avoidance, suppressed grief, complacency, and so on—as they choose to run, rather than take the time to better understand themselves and grow.

The Simplest Maze is a new spin on the haunted house story, as it’s not the house that’s haunted, but the people instead. The adversities those who enter the house face are represented through common horror symbols so readers can better understand just how frustrating it is watching people choose to avoid their problems rather than confront an easily surmountable issue. It is my hope that after reading this book, readers will come to wonder what their own adversities may be. It presents the question, if you were lost in the simplest of mazes, what would your maze be? And what would you need to do to find your way out?

Ever since I was young I’ve been motivated to create a novel worthy of publication; this has been a persistent goal of mine throughout high school and college. At the start of college, I had a vague idea of the concept behind Eyes of Absence, though I had no idea what the plot would be like—I just had a sense of the feeling behind the book and the topics I wanted to cover. During this time, I studied song lyrics for both inspiration and for their poetic content. I found countless lyrics with deep and personal stories behind the songs and worked to understand how to break the lyrics down to find the hidden meanings.

I broke down as many song lyrics as possible to better appreciate them and I grew to admire their inherent poetic nature; this endeavor encouraged me to construct my own works that I felt would be fitting for the general themes I wanted to incorporate within my hopefully soon-to-be manuscript. I spent my free time freshman year: constantly building and ripping apart different poetry that would fit the character and the adversities presented within the story. I realized I’d never read a book that was closely tied in with poetry and lyrics to complement and enhance a storyline and help readers see deeper meanings behind the surface action occurring within a story. This process involved writing, rewriting, and reconstructing the same 11 pieces of poetry for over two years until they were saturated with as much meaning as their lines could ever hope to hold, and were later enhanced further through the story they were presented in. Perfecting the lyrical and poetic aspects of Eyes of Absence­—and also inventing a new form of written cipher for the story—took me close to four years to complete.

While I was perfecting these 11 pieces of poetry, I worked to assimilate as much knowledge related to literature as possible because I knew whatever I wrote needed to be completely original. During this time I learned about gothic archetypes and was immediately enthralled by their use and appearance within so many modern stories, yet their “raw,” fascinating forms had never been entirely utilized; their symbols were simply silhouetted within literature, but the archetypes themselves were never presented in the clear. In presenting the raw gothic archetypes, such as the anima and shadow, I was confident I could create a story that would boast a new variety of memorable characters that readers would remember long after the story’s end.

As I learned about the many gothic archetypes, I experienced and witnessed the darker sides of life, and these experiences served as inspiration to catalyze the development of Eyes of Absence. Despite being fiction, Eyes of Absence represents the genuine horrors of life and the complexities of self in an unapologetically true way.