Flicker City Phantoms

Flicker City Phantoms is a Queer sci-fi "hopepunk" book series. It explores a future where technology has managed to "cure" death by resurrecting ghosts into holographic bodies for 10,000 people. The books follow the struggles of "specters" to integrate and adjust to 31st century society, where ghosts lack full citizenship and must work in a restrictive "ghost gig economy" to prevent competing with the Living.

The series blends humour and romance with plotty, theme-y mysteries that explore what it means to be a person, what it means to be a citizen, and how we're all pretty spectral under capitalism. But, like, with jokes!

The Flicker City Phantoms series is published by Podium Entertainment.

Book 1: Dead New World

Hildy Doval is dead—and still unemployed . . .

Humanity wasn't quite ready for immortality, even in 3025. Ever since the Flicker/Helix company "cured" death with technologically advanced holographic hardware, flicker ghosts have been secondary citizens, lacking purpose and agency.

Spending her afterlife in a boarding house in Faraday City, Hildy is the least-requested flicker-ghost at Carlotta Sun's Purgatory House for Spectral Services. At Carlotta Sun's, Hildy competes daily for ghost gigs against her more marketable housemates: the flighty musician Eyvind, desperate to compose the masterpiece he never got to in life, and Anjali, an imperious silent-film extra whose single surviving motion picture shot her to post-mortem stardom despite it being based on a lie.

Meanwhile, a shadowy, headless ghost called the Graverobber has been spotted emerging from holographic billboards, snatching the resurrected from their so-called lives and sowing chaos throughout the city. When one of their fellow boarders goes missing, Hildy and her friends find themselves at the center of a highly publicized mystery. With only two months to go before a crucial election that'll decide the future of all specters, they must determine who the Graverobber is―and, more importantly, where they belong in this dead new world.

"A triumphant work from a unique visionary." —Kirkus Reviews

Cover art by Barbara Ciardo.

Out November 10.

Pre-Order anywhere you buy books, or via Podium Entertainment.

Book 2: Bright Dead Things

The second book in the Flicker City Phantoms series is set to be published by Podium Entertainment on 11/16/2027. More information coming soon!

In the meantime, some hints and references:

Television
French Revolution
The Great Smoke Pall of 1950
His Girl Friday
Himalayan cats
Morte D'Arthur
Panna Cotta