A year ago, I was getting ready to put Teeth in the Silence into the world.

I thought I knew what came next.

I did not.

Teeth in the Silence was personal in a way that is difficult to explain without simply handing someone the book. It came from trauma, survival, memory, silence, and everything that remains after you have lived through something you once weren't certain you would survive.

After it was finished, I started writing fiction.

Then I wrote another story.

And another.

Somewhere along the way, I realized I hadn't actually stopped writing about the things that had always interested me. I had just started giving them rooms to live in.

Sometimes monsters, too.

The stories became stranger. Darker. Some became supernatural. Others didn't need anything supernatural at all.

I wrote about grief and memory. Parents and children. Love and guilt. Technology. Dementia. Things in the woods. Things behind doors. The people we lose, the people we desperately want back, and the uncomfortable question of whether getting exactly what we ask for would actually save us.

I even wrote about a dog.

Especially a dog.

Eventually there were thirty-three stories.

That became too much for one book, so those stories became two.

The first seventeen are ready.

On October 20, 2026, almost exactly one year after Teeth in the Silence, I will release my first collection of horror fiction:

The Room Isn’t Empty Anymore: Book One.

I'm incredibly proud of this book.

It is strange to say that because I've spent so long inside these stories that there were periods when I could no longer tell whether they were good. I could only see sentences. Problems. Continuity. Things that needed another pass.

Then I finished.

And I listened to the entire book.

Then I listened to it again.

Then, because apparently I have a problem, I listened to the damn thing a third time.

I love it.

Not because every story is comfortable. Some very much aren't.

I love it because somewhere during the process, these seventeen separate stories became a book. They started speaking to one another. Questions kept resurfacing in different forms.

What does grief make us willing to believe?

How much of ourselves can we lose before we become someone else?

If you could remove the thing that hurts most, should you?

What happens when something impossible enters an ordinary life?

And what if the impossible thing isn't the most frightening thing in the room?

There are stories here that I hope scare you.

There are stories I hope make you uncomfortable.

There are a couple that I hope break your heart.

And there are things I hope you don't completely understand until you read them a second time.

That's intentional.

The room changes once you know where to look.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be sharing more about the collection, the stories inside it, the artwork, and how you can get an advance copy and become one of its first readers.

For now, I finally get to say this:

The Room Isn’t Empty Anymore: Book One

17 stories.

October 20, 2026.

Some stories end.

Some stay with you.

Come in.

Robert Dutch