Jake Parnell has spent his life inside the glow of a welding arc-steady hands, quiet focus, and the simple satisfaction of shaping metal to his will. But when a routine job goes wrong and his welding helmet fails, a blinding flash sears his retinas and plunges him into a world of haze, halos, and disorienting white light. What should have been a painful but temporary injury becomes something far stranger.As Jake's vision slowly returns, so do the shadows.At first, they're nothing more than flickers at the edge of his sight-blurred shapes that vanish when he turns his head. Harmless, he tells himself. Aftereffects. Retinal burn. His doctor would probably say the same. But the shadows don't behave like afterimages. They linger. They move. They watch.And they're getting closer.Jake tries to keep his life together while he recovers: navigating his home by touch, relying on his friend Tom for help, and convincing himself that the strange figures he sees are tricks of the light. But when one of the shadows appears in broad daylight-standing in the middle of the road, unmistakably real-Jake's world fractures. The crash that follows leaves him shaken, terrified, and certain of one thing:Whatever he's seeing isn't just in his head.As the shadows grow bolder, Jake is forced to confront a truth buried deep in his past-something he witnessed, something he tried to forget, something that has been waiting for him in the periphery of his vision. His injury didn't create the shadows. It revealed them.Now Jake must uncover what they are, why they're here, and what they want before they consume more than just his sight. Because the closer they get, the more he realizes:They're not shadows at all.They're memories.And memories can kill.The Peripheral is a grounded psychological thriller about perception, trauma, and the thin line between what we see and what we refuse to face. Atmospheric, character‑driven, and unnervingly intimate, it explores how the mind protects us-until it doesn't. Fans of slow‑burn suspense, blue‑collar protagonists, and reality‑bending tension will find themselves pulled into Jake's unraveling world, where every shadow has weight and every silence has teeth. Daniel R. Mangru writes speculative fiction rooted in the human condition, shaped by an MFA in Creative Writing and lifelong curiosity about how people make sense of the world. His influences include Raymond Carver's stripped‑down honesty, Rod Serling's belief in the strange and moral, and Samuel Clemens's humor and bite.He was born in the rural farm town of Colusa, California, and now lives in Sacramento with his wife and child. Outside of writing, Daniel spends his time reading about science, technology, and the odd corners of history, along with mysteries and horror that stay close to reality.
