Still Here - Jason Buss

He watches. He classifies. He allows. The system has been watching him for much longer.

By day, he moderates content for a platform that never sleeps - reviewing, annotating, classifying an endless feed of bodies and behavior, deciding in fractions of a second what gets to exist and what disappears. He has learned to observe without participating. To maintain distance. To keep the thin membrane between witness and subject intact.

By night, he moves through apartments that all have the same bed, the same lamp, the same angle of light - meeting men who feel familiar in ways he can't locate, whose hands find the scar on his arm with a certainty that shouldn't be possible.

He tells himself the two lives don't touch.

The system knows otherwise.

Still Here is a queer psychological horror novel about surveillance, identity, and the particular kind of dissociation that develops in people who have learned that observation is safer than presence. Structured as a digital interface - queue, feed, private messages, archive, camera - the novel follows its unnamed protagonist as the boundary between his professional role and his private life begins to dissolve, and something in the system begins to recognize him in ways that precede memory, precede record, precede the self he believes himself to be.

For readers who have ever used invisibility as survival. For readers who know what it costs to be seen - and what it costs not to be.

The horror isn't that something is hunting you. The horror is that it already knows you.