Noir Falling: A Bizarre Mystery of Art and the Mind

by L. Andrew Cooper

Daniel Lowe, a presence but not a student at the prestigious University, keeps finding himself in strange situations, not sure how he got there. Color whorls devour people and places, a beautiful woman in a null space called The Blank asks him to save her from her corporate magnate husband, and dozens of missing students might somehow relate to these calamities. With companions such as Chuck Adair, a member of a philosophical Society that crams his head full of big ideas early on, and Voice, a young woman sprung from his head, he traverses hallucinatory landscapes, the interiors of famous paintings, and more on his quest to figure out both where a growing mass of “clues” will lead.

Noir Falling blends surrealism with dark noir, dark fantasy, horror, and philosophical speculation, taking Daniel on a wild quest to find out who he is while he tries to save an irresistible femme fatale from an international corporate conspiracy to traffic in the "substance" of art and humanity.

321 pages, Paperback

Published February 8, 2025

About the author

L. Andrew Cooper specializes in the provocative, scary, and strange. His current project, The Middle Reaches, is a serialized epic of weird horror and dark fantasy on Amazon Kindle Vella. His latest release, Records of the Hightower Massacre, an LGBTQ+ horror novella co-authored with Maeva Wunn, imagines a near-future dystopia where anti-queer hate runs a program to "correct" deviants. Stains of Atrocity, his newest collection of stories, goes to uncomfortable psychological and visceral extremes. His latest novel, Crazy Time, combines literary horror and dark fantasy in a contemporary quest to undo what may be a divine curse. Other published works include novels Burning the Middle Ground and Descending Lines; short story collections Leaping at Thorns and Peritoneum; poetry collection The Great Sonnet Plot of Anton Tick; non-fiction Gothic Realities and Dario Argento; co-edited fiction anthologies Imagination Reimagined and Reel Dark; and the co-edited textbook Monsters. He has also written more than 30 award-winning screenplays. After studying literature and film at Harvard and Princeton, he used his Ph.D. to teach about favorite topics from coast to coast in the United States. He now focuses on writing and lives with his husband in North Hollywood, California. Find him at www.landrewcooper.com.