A young woman orchestrates her own disappearance. Her mother hires a private investigator to track her down. Her sister has suspicions about where she might be, but no sense of how to get there. Loturia is, after all, unlocatable and literally abstract: a city that exists only in language, the conceptual creation of another pair of sisters. Meanwhile, in a scheme to perpetrate a literary hoax, a would-be fraudster stumbles upon these sisters' literary works - a book of fabricated folklore and a treatise on speculative linguistics - which might intersect to point the way to a missing person's whereabouts.

Part noir mystery, part metaphysics, In the Silver Light of a Star That Is No Star takes this scenario as grounds for a restless, shapeshifting story. Splitting its narrative down the middle, it lets both halves unfold in parallel - one on the left page, one on the right - so that it's up to you, the reader, to identify cause from consequence and stitch events together. The result is a textual mirror-maze in the lineage of Poe and Borges, an unstable reality infused with philosophical horrors, full of forgeries and duplications that undermine all conclusive meanings.

Daniel David Froid is a writer based in Phoenix, Arizona. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Black Warrior Review, Post Road, Weird Horror, and elsewhere. In the Silver Light of a Star That Is No Star is his first book.