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The series, the author, the imprint
An ongoing series of literary psychological dramas set in one fictional American town. Each book stands alone. The cast accumulates. The town stays where it is. The Seer keeps arriving.
A shared world
The same diner, courthouse, hospital, hardware store, lake, neighborhoods, and roads keep returning. What changes is the person sitting in the booth—and the thing they cannot bring themselves to stop doing.
Seer Warns is an ongoing series of literary novels, all set in Harmon, an unincorporated town somewhere in the American Midwest, on a county road that does not appear on most state highway maps. Each book follows one resident through the year a stranger walks up to them and names what is about to happen. The stranger is not the same person twice. The town is.
These are psychological dramas, not horror. The Seer is unsettling only in the way an honest mirror is unsettling; there is no monster, no gore, no supernatural threat. The tension is interior, the slow pressure of a person watching themselves make the choice they were warned against, and the stakes are domestic, a marriage, a career, a parent, a name, the self you cannot survive becoming. What the books are interested in is character under foreknowledge: what a person does when the alibi of not-knowing has been taken away.
The books can be read in any order. Reading them in publication order rewards the patient reader with a slow accretion of cast, David Marsh’s wife Sarah, an ER nurse at St. Clare’s, turns up in the background of three other books before her own; Ruth Calloway’s sister appears in five; the Lamplighter’s booth is occupied by a different protagonist in roughly half the volumes, but no book depends on any other. The series is closer in shape to Cheever’s Shady Hill or Munro’s Jubilee than to a serialized arc. The town is the through-line; the people are the variables.
The first six Seer Warns novels, from The Good Father through The Lawyer Daughter, are published in Kindle and paperback. The twenty-book lineup continues with further standalone stories from Harmon. Visit publication news for the latest releases.
Seer Warns is published by Seer Press, an imprint of i4Seer LLC. The press exists for the series and a small number of adjacent projects. It is not currently open to unsolicited manuscripts.
The broader Seer catalog also includes Seer Frights, middle-grade horror for readers ages 8–12, and Seer Worlds, a fantasy-adventure series about a small traveler moving between worlds with different rules.
Books are typeset in EB Garamond, set with display matter in Cinzel, and printed in trade paperback through a short-run press in the American Midwest. ebook editions are produced in EPUB3 and distributed through the standard channels. The covers are designed in-house, and the cover art is by a single illustrator the press has commissioned for the duration of the series.
The map of Harmon on the front page of this site is the working geography of the series. It is built from the same town document the books are written against, every named street, every named establishment, every named landmark is on the map exactly where it is in the books. The map is, in that sense, the source, the books are downstream of it.
It updates as the series does. Establishments that appear in later books will appear on the map as those books reach publication. The pin density on the map at any given moment is roughly a count of how many books have shipped.
For reviews, interviews, classroom adoption, foreign rights, or anything else that requires the press to send mail back: press@i4seer.com. Galleys are sent to recognized critics and educators on request. Publication updates are available on the news page.
Brief quotation from the books, in the manner standard to reviewing and criticism, is welcome without further permission. Longer reproduction, including reprint anthologies, requires written permission from the imprint.
Harmon is not on any map. The county is not a real county. The plant on Cass Street has never existed. St. Clare’s Hospital is a building in the writer’s head. The Lamplighter has been open since 1977 in a town that has been open, in the same way, for somewhat longer than that.
None of which is to say it isn’t real. The reader who recognizes the third booth on the right, or the smell of the diner coffee, or the brown pencil mark on a hardware-store door frame, that reader is in Harmon, has been in Harmon, will be in Harmon again. The town exists where it has always existed, which is in the booth across from you, the moment you sit down.