Participant

What You’ll Love:

• A fearless near-future premise – Participant takes the logic of social media, influencer culture, parasocial attachment, and immersive technology one step further — then asks what happens when no one can look away.
• A complicated, unforgettable protagonist – Beverly is funny, damaged, delusional, perceptive, and painfully human. Her choices are often alarming, but her longing is recognizable: to be seen, to be desired, to matter.
• Dark humor with a sharp edge – The novel’s satire is biting, uncomfortable, and often absurd — but always aimed at a world where exploitation has learned to call itself opportunity.
• A story about bodies, beauty, and ownership – From child influencing to plastic surgery, celebrity branding, virtual intimacy, and digital likeness rights, Participant explores what happens when personhood becomes a product.
• Not a romance — but absolutely about obsession – This is a story about desire, fantasy, projection, and the dangerous illusion that knowing someone’s image means knowing their soul.

About the Book:

Beverly used to be Neverly: a child influencer packaged for public consumption before she was old enough to understand what was being sold.

Now she teaches art in rural Forster, living a small, carefully managed life at the edge of a city that keeps turning people into content. She has a boyfriend, a job, a past she tries not to look at too closely, and a hunger she can’t quite name.

Then she discovers Participant.

The underground immersive platform promises what ordinary social media cannot: not just the chance to watch the lives of the famous, but to feel them. Through hidden sensors and private feeds, users can slip into celebrity encounters from the inside — intimate, anonymous, and impossible to look away from.

For Beverly, the pull is irresistible. Especially when Participant leads her to The Athlete, a charismatic football star whose curated life looks like everything she has ever wanted: strength, beauty, fame, family, certainty. The more she experiences him, the more convinced she becomes that their connection is real.

But as Beverly moves from watching to wanting, from wanting to pursuing, the world around her begins to reveal its true machinery. Childhoods can be monetized. Bodies can be modified, copied, and sold. Pain can be packaged as entertainment. And the platforms that promise connection may only be teaching everyone how to participate in someone else’s exploitation.

Sharp, disturbing, and darkly comic, Participant is a near-future speculative novel about celebrity obsession, sexual commodification, coercive technology, and the terrible cost of confusing access with intimacy.

Content Note:
Participant is a novel for adult readers. It contains explicit adult sexual content and depictions or discussions of exploitation, including sexual exploitation, sexual assault, sex trafficking, child image exploitation, stalking, bodily harm, and homophobic/transphobic language used in character voice.