The Cicada Song

What if the sound of summer stopped you from saying no?

In coastal North Carolina, cicadas are everywhere. Their song is ordinary, familiar, almost impossible to notice—until people begin doing things they would normally stop themselves from doing.

Josephine Bennett is among the first to feel the change. At first, it seems almost liberating. She speaks more honestly. Makes decisions faster. Stops tolerating things she has endured for years. But as arguments become assaults, private impulses become public acts, and ordinary people begin crossing lines they cannot uncross, acoustic specialist Kamary Phillips discovers something hidden inside the cicadas’ song.

It does not control the mind.
It does not create desire.

It weakens the part of us that decides not to act.

As the phenomenon spreads, one question becomes impossible to avoid: if an impulse was always yours, how responsible are you when the thing that normally stops you begins to disappear?

The Cicada Song is a psychological eco-horror novel about free will, inhibition, responsibility, and the terrifying distance between wanting something and choosing to do it.