Fuel

The system harvested your trauma. This is what happens when the harvest stops.

Isaiah, Ellen, Lance, Jake, and Carlton have nothing in common—except the ghost that lives in their bodies. A fist in the chest. A hollow behind the sternum. A weight that will not lift. They have been processed by foster care, by wilderness programs, by the military, by the VA, by the self-help industry. They have been prescribed, diagnosed, managed, and harvested. They are fuel for a machine that runs on human suffering.

But something is changing. A peer support group in a church basement. A converted garage with yellow walls. A mutual aid network built on couches and can openers and the willingness to stay. One by one, they learn to sit with the ghost—to feel the frozen sensation, to let the survival response complete, to withdraw their fuel from the machine.

Fuel is a novel about trauma and resistance, about the architecture of permitted harm and the stubborn, unglamorous work of healing. It is a mirror for anyone who has ever been told they are broken and a door for anyone who is ready to stop running.