The Bitter Aftertaste
I’ve always loved zombie stories.
Not just the blood and chaos (though, let’s be honest—I live for a good gore-streaked takedown), but the truth they expose. The way they strip people down to who they really are when the Wi-Fi’s gone, the power’s out, and the rules don’t matter anymore.
But with The Bitter Aftertaste, I wanted to write more than just another end-of-the-world body count. I wanted to write about what it means to carry danger inside you. About living in a world that treats your very existence as a threat. About the quiet apocalypse some of us have been surviving long before the first infected corpse took a bite.
So I created GlycoSynth.
A sugar substitute, sold as a miracle. Calorie-free. Guilt-free. Side-effect-free. Until it wasn’t. Until death became a trigger, and every sweetener-sipping body turned into a potential bomb. A pandemic wrapped in candy coating.
And suddenly, the story wasn’t just horror. It was personal.
Because if you’ve ever been queer in a straight world, chronically ill in a health-worshipping culture, mentally ill in a society that fears what it can’t fix—you already know what it feels like to be other. You know what it feels like to have your body politicized, pathologized, or made invisible until it becomes inconvenient. You know what it feels like to have your very presence make people uncomfortable. Unsafe. Uncertain.
This story is for you.
It follows four survivors—Kobe, Xander, Avery, and Zoe—as Austin collapses around them. Each of them brings their own trauma, their own skills, their own ghosts. Together, they run. Then they fight. Then they bleed. Then they rebuild. Sort of.
“We can’t stay here. This city’s a fucking graveyard waiting to happen.” —Kobe
Kobe is a former Navy SEAL and cop, married to Xander, a medic who’s been patching people up long enough to know when a wound won’t close. They’re joined by Avery, another ex-SEAL with more grit than patience, and Zoe, a sharp-tongued tattoo artist with a brain wired for survival and a heart she guards with sarcasm and ink.
They’re not perfect. They’re not immune. They are, in fact, infected—like everyone else. GlycoSynth doesn’t just kill. It lingers. Which means anyone who dies can turn. So staying alive? It’s not just about avoiding bites. It’s about keeping your friends from bleeding out. It’s about watching every fall, every fever, every knife wound, and wondering if today is the day you become the danger.
And still, they fight for each other.
“Every scream is a life ending, a family shattered. How do you stop that? How do you even try?” —Xander
Yes, this book is brutal. There’s rot. There’s fear. There’s hunger—of all kinds. But beneath the blood and the body horror, there’s something sweeter: found family, queer love, the raw courage of choosing hope when you have every reason not to.
“If this is how the world ends, let it end with my hand in yours.” —Zoe
Writing this book let me explore the systems we pretend will save us—and what rises in their place when they don’t. It let me honor the people who’ve kept going through grief, trauma, disability, marginalization, and heartbreak. The ones who build new worlds out of wreckage. The ones who remind us that surviving is messy, painful, and deeply queer.
The Bitter Aftertaste is the first in The Sweet Decay series. And yes—there’s more to come. More blood. More heart. More complicated, stubborn, loyal-as-hell characters who refuse to die quietly.
Because survival isn’t just instinct.
It’s resistance.
“It was supposed to be guilt-free.
Just a little sweetness to make life easier.
Now it’s turning the dead into monsters—
and every bite could be your last.”
And sometimes, the only way to heal the world is to burn it down—then choose who you bring with you into the ash.