Sensory Parasites

Your brain is not showing you the world. It is showing you its best guess.

Sensory Parasites: A Strange Phenomena Book is the fifth book in D.R. Ashford's acclaimed Strange Phenomena series-ten stories that use the neuroscience of perception as the framework for a new kind of horror.

The premise: the human brain receives approximately eleven million bits of sensory information per second and consciously processes around forty. The rest is filtered-suppressed by systems operating below awareness, protecting ordinary consciousness from the overwhelming complexity of what is actually there. These filters are not neutral. They have thresholds. And thresholds can be crossed.

Each story in this collection explores a different vector through which the perceptual threshold is breached-and what becomes perceptible when it is.

What readers will find inside:

A soldier's sensory infection spreads to her husband and daughter through proximity-not biological contact, but the transmission of a perceptual state from one nervous system to another, until the family must choose between separation and a fundamentally altered experience of reality. A painter begins perceiving a wavelength outside the human visual range; his ophthalmologist quietly admits he has been seeing it too, for two years, and has been waiting for someone credible to report it. A botanist's expedition into an unmapped valley makes contact with a mycorrhizal network so old and so dense it has developed something indistinguishable from awareness-and it reads her the way it reads soil chemistry, without category, without distinction, without any particular concern for what she is. A couple discovers that an entity occupies the corner of their bedroom-but only when they are both looking at it at the same moment, which raises the question of whether the entity exists in the room or at the intersection of their attention.

Ten stories. Ten thresholds. Ten different ways that the gap between filtered and unfiltered reality becomes a door.

The final story follows a researcher who has spent nine years compiling case files on perceptual phenomena-and who realizes, too late to change anything, that careful documentation of a pattern that spreads through attention is itself an act of approach. The reader who has followed all ten stories has been doing exactly what she describes.

Sensory Parasites will appeal to readers of Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, and Peter Watts-literary weird fiction in which the horror is not what threatens you but what you have been prevented from seeing, and what happens when the prevention fails.

D.R. Ashford spent four decades as a technology leader before turning to fiction. He brings systematic rigor to existential dread-and in Sensory Parasites, the dread is as close as the forty bits your brain chose to show you, and as vast as everything it didn't.