A novel in episodes · Psychological horror
The Dean of Lucifer
A book that does not exist. A chapter no one wrote.
A doctor who writes everything down — dates, measurements, two columns for what he feels and what he can prove — finds a file on his own computer that he did not write. Eleven pages, in his exact hand, describing what a dinner that has not yet happened will have meant.
Every light can be lowered, provided the man is convinced he never saw it lit.
The premise
A book that does not exist
He looks for the book everywhere and it is nowhere: not in the library, not in any catalog, not in Portuguese or Spanish or Latin. And still he has read it. So he does the only thing he knows how to do with something he cannot prove — he begins to write it down, and to measure the house around him, entry by dated entry.
The chair that moved three centimeters overnight. The light that seems lower than the paragraph where he defined it. His own name, said a little differently each morning by a wife who swears it has always sounded that way. Each too small to prove. Each kept, dated, against the day someone tells him, gently, that it was always like this.
Where to begin
Episode 1
The first episode opens the story and the method: the dream of a book that cannot be found, the discovery of a chapter no one wrote, and the first week of a man measuring his own house to stay sane. It closes on a column that will not resolve.
Between the chapters runs a second document — a calm, clinical manual on how to take a true thing from a person without touching a single fact.
Complaint
- A light that seems lower.
- A name half a tone off.
- A smell no one else can find.
Finding
- A chair, three centimeters.
- A file dated in advance.
- A notebook, kept in two places.
The author
Almir Miguel Jr.
Almir Miguel Jr. is a physician in the interior of southern Brazil. He came to medicine from the exact sciences, and that double training — the habit of measurement set against the unreliability of the body — runs through his fiction. The Dean of Lucifer is his debut novel, published in episodes.
Notes
From the notebook
Also in Portuguese
O Decano de Lúcifer
The novel is written and published first in Brazilian Portuguese.