Killstate

by Chad Lehrmann

Be careful what doors you open. You won’t like what lies behind them. First, it will just be more doors. But each one darkens your soul a little more.

Answers.

Amber Knox has been searching for them since murderers came to her secluded East Texas town eight years earlier for a deadly game called Killtown. Then the horror followed her to college a few years later when the Host- the villain behind Killtown- returns.

Now, Amber is a probationary agent with the FBI, analyzing serial killers. Her former friend, Rogan Benson has just released a documentary about the Killtown murders, against her wishes. But when a man wearing the costume of the Host is murdered at the premiere, and then the murders start again, she is forced to turn to Rogan for help. When it becomes apparent that the murders might be the work of a cult that idolizes the Host, she must also pull her parents from their safety of retirement far away. With Sean Densman, the last person to wear the Host mask, locked up and on a journey to his own answers, who could be behind the new murders?

Can Amber and her friends do what is necessary to end the cult that seeks to unleash KILLSTATE on the world, even if their own hands have to get dirty?

Sometimes the only way to make things right is to spill blood.

The Killogy concludes here!

239 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 15, 2025

About the author

The only child of a family that lived on a ranch in the Central Texas Countryside, Chad Lehrmann learned early on to use his imagination to entertain himself. Creating stories in his head and acting them out eventually led to him entertaining the idea to write stories. He began this process in his teens, but life got in the way. After eleven years in ministry, Chad became a public school teacher in College Station, Texas. Working with teenagers (and raising two of his own), he began to read young adult fiction like Harry Potter and Percy Jackson. Combined with his love of the works of Stephen King, Chad began to recall those stories and ideas from his youth, but with a new perspective. Tired of explaining to his students that if he was not a teacher, he would be a writer, but doing nothing to validate that- he penned his first novel, The Sawyer Shepherd Chronicles: Rites of Passage. It would be the culmination of characters and story beats that had been germinating in his head for over twenty years. He hopes you will join him on this journey!

Chad still teaches at College Station High School, where he is currently the Psychology, Sociology, and Debate teacher. He is married and has two teenage daughters and as a family they love vacationing in the mountains (which are a strong inspiration for the stories he writes). He also has hobbies of woodworking and collecting action figures.