The Lizard King's Shadow

The Lizard King's Shadow is a raw, suspenseful, rock-and-roll fever dream about music, memory, addiction, survival, and the strange things that start whispering when a man has already survived too much.
David has spent a lifetime learning that some songs save you, some songs haunt you, and some songs know things they have no business knowing. After addiction, loss, prison lights, damaged memory, and the kind of pain that leaves fingerprints on the soul, he wants peace. A quiet place. His dogs. A little music. A chance to breathe.
Then Marion Kane hears a voice coming from an unplugged Doors recording.
The voice says: The door is not the entrance.
From that moment, nothing in the house feels normal again. The dogs stare at empty hallways. A cassette appears where no cassette should be. A mirror in Room 27 reflects a shadow that does not belong to anyone standing there. A black van keeps showing up in the rain. A government file marked Project CHOIR points toward secret recordings, chemical experiments, rehab clinics, surveillance rooms, and a mystery built around the myth of Jim Morrison.
But this is not a story about worshipping a dead rock star.
This is a story about arguing with the ghost.
Marion does not kneel before the legend. David does not trust the voice. The dogs do not blink. Together, they follow a trail of tapes, contracts, motel rooms, old stage lights, hidden microphones, and warnings that sound like lyrics from a song nobody remembers recording.
The deeper they go, the harder it becomes to tell the difference between haunting and conspiracy, memory and manipulation, recovery and control. Every clue opens another door. Every door leads to another room. And every room seems to have been waiting for them.
At the center of it all is Morrison's shadow: dangerous, poetic, brilliant, doomed, and still powerful enough to pull the living toward the edge. Is it supernatural? Psychological? Government-made? A myth that escaped its cage? Or something worse: a machine that learned how to use music as a weapon?
With the pulse of a midnight concert and the paranoia of a locked-room thriller, The Lizard King's Shadow moves through Adirondack cabins, motel mirrors, rehab bunkers, storm roads, old recordings, and the brutal private battlefield of a survivor trying not to disappear.
This is a novel for anyone who ever believed music could save them, then wondered what else it might be capable of doing.
Raw, dark, funny, haunted, and loud as hell, The Lizard King's Shadow is a PhishStones rock-and-roll thriller about the voices we follow, the shadows we fight, and the dogs who know the truth before the humans do.

PhishStones (aka David Salmon)

Author. Survivor. Loudmouth with a pen.

PhishStones doesn't write books so much as he sets them on fire and hands you the ashes.

Known for his raw, R-rated, laugh-out-loud, occasionally uncomfortable truth-telling, PhishStones writes for people who've lived-and aren't interested in polite bullshit anymore. His work blends dark humor, redemption, outdoor grit, boomer wisdom, and the kind of honesty that only comes from screwing things up, owning it, and walking forward anyway.