The Naldusk

Brian Matson is sixteen years old and no one is coming to save him.

At Oakwood High, Eric shoves his face into toilets while Jack watches and laughs. At home, his parents set three plates at the dinner table instead of four. The school counselor files reports that go nowhere. The art teacher notices his talent and does nothing with the knowledge.
The only person who sees Brian - really sees him - is his eleven-year-old sister, Sarah. She saves three months of allowance to buy him Prismacolor pencils. She leaves peanut butter sandwiches outside his door at night. She is the only evidence that he matters.
Then, at 1:14 AM on a night when sleep won't come, Brian opens his sketchbook and draws something he doesn't recognize. Something with hollow eyes and a sealed mouth and a crown of spines. Something that feels less like invention and more like excavation - as if the image was already there, waiting beneath the page.
That night, the drawing visits him in a dream. It speaks without language. It offers without words. The deal is simple:
No more pain.
The Naldusk bonds with Brian's body. It transforms him - grey skin, extending jaw, mandibles that click with a patience that sounds like hunger. It feeds on his rage. And Brian has so much rage.
But the Naldusk is growing. Each feeding makes it stronger, harder to control. And when Brian discovers it can act without his body - without his permission - the question stops being whether he can stop it and becomes whether any part of him wants to.
Two years later, Sarah gets a visit of her own.
Some monsters are drawn into existence.
A standalone supernatural horror novel about bullying, invisibility, and the thing that waits in the space between rage and surrender.