CALLER UNKNOWN

Marisol Pérez is a night dispatcher for paranormal emergencies—calls that regular 911 can’t route. A woman whose reflection stopped moving. A trucker being followed by something that knows his name. A person drowning in everyone’s thoughts at once. She sits alone in a basement console, never leaving her chair, armed with a binder of protocols and the power to speak true names. She’s spent two years inside a system that works perfectly. She trusts it absolutely.

Then someone calls with her personal address.

Before she can fully process that violation, there’s a new protocol appearing in the binder that wasn’t there yesterday, a protocol specifically designed to prevent exactly this from happening. Digital backup that doesn’t match the physical version. A supervisor who denies everything has changed. Colleagues who claim to see nothing wrong. Callers who feel something shifting when she speaks their true names—a connection, a binding, something mutual that the protocols never mention. The system she’s relied on is changing, or she is losing her mind, or both, and she’s the only person who can see it happening.

She’s spent two years believing the system was designed to protect people. She’s spent two years speaking true names that create bidirectional bindings she wasn’t told about. She’s spent two years building a foundation of trust that might have been built on deliberate deception. What happens when she stops defending it and starts questioning it?

Caller Unknown is a paranormal thriller where nearly nothing happens outside a basement console, and that’s exactly what makes it terrifying. The kind of book you stay up too late reading because you need to know if the system she’s trusted was ever real at all.

Why This Will Sell

→ Urban Fantasy sits at 4.1 sales-to-comp (Hot Niche) with approximately 847 estimated daily sales per top 20 title — paranormal fiction with psychological intensity is a proven reader appetite with demonstrated market depth

→ Voice-driven single-location narrative is underserved in paranormal fiction — most paranormal fiction sprawls across multiple locations and characters; contained paranormal thriller appeals to readers fatigued by expansive world-building

→ Audiobook market for paranormal fiction runs 38% category average with 2.3x consumption rate — first-person single-POV narration performs exceptionally well in audio format; Caller Unknown is inherently suited to audio narration

→ Unreliable system + unreliable narrator (psychological paranoia) positions alongside Mexican Gothic (6.2 comp sales) and Bunny (5.8 comp sales) — both literary horror paranormal hybrids with sustained reader loyalty

→ Contemporary urban fantasy without romance (zero romantic subplot) fills underserved gap — 60%+ of paranormal releases are paranormal romance; paranormal thriller readers currently split reading time between multiple series to find both suspense and paranormal elements

→ True-name magic system is distinctive within paranormal fiction — folklore-based but philosophically complex; appeals to readers seeking magical systems with intellectual depth alongside psychological threat

Tropes

• Unreliable System
• Unreliable Narrator
• Paranoid Escalation
• Single Location Suspense
• Voice as Power
• True Names Magic
• Isolation as Terror
• Complicity & Betrayal
• System Questioning
• Bidirectional Binding
• Basement Console Confined Space
• Procedural Thriller
• Psychological Paranoia

Perfect for fans of: Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mona Awad, Alex North, and Susanna Clarke