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The Chosen Tenant
PRAISE FOR THE CHOSEN TENANT:
"Sharp, original, and uncomfortably relevant... Horror for anyone who's ever tried to medicate themselves into being 'acceptable.'" — Nerdection (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Elliott's thoughts are becoming real. And the house has been waiting for someone like him.
Thirty-four-year-old technical writer Elliott has just started medication for his ADHD when strange things begin happening in his Victorian rental apartment. The house at [address] has a documented history: tenants who stay for decades, unexplained gaps, a fire in 1889 that burned and didn't burn simultaneously, and a 1927 suicide by threads of "unknown composition."
As Elliott researches the building's past, his executive dysfunction spirals. Browser tabs multiply. Spreadsheets tracking impossible patterns consume his days. His partner Alexis grows concerned. Work deadlines slip further away. And then Elliott discovers something worse than the house's dark history: his medicated brain is manifesting his thoughts into physical reality—and the house has been selecting tenants with this exact ability for over two hundred years.
What does a sentient Victorian house want with neurodivergent minds? And what happens when you can't stop thinking about the wrong things?
For readers who loved Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, and Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street, The Chosen Tenant is a literary horror novel about neurodivergence, reality-bending terror, and the spaces that choose us.
Content warnings: Body horror, reality distortion, anxiety/ADHD representation, psychological distress, self-harm themes
"Sharp, original, and uncomfortably relevant... Horror for anyone who's ever tried to medicate themselves into being 'acceptable.'" — Nerdection (⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐)
Elliott's thoughts are becoming real. And the house has been waiting for someone like him.
Thirty-four-year-old technical writer Elliott has just started medication for his ADHD when strange things begin happening in his Victorian rental apartment. The house at [address] has a documented history: tenants who stay for decades, unexplained gaps, a fire in 1889 that burned and didn't burn simultaneously, and a 1927 suicide by threads of "unknown composition."
As Elliott researches the building's past, his executive dysfunction spirals. Browser tabs multiply. Spreadsheets tracking impossible patterns consume his days. His partner Alexis grows concerned. Work deadlines slip further away. And then Elliott discovers something worse than the house's dark history: his medicated brain is manifesting his thoughts into physical reality—and the house has been selecting tenants with this exact ability for over two hundred years.
What does a sentient Victorian house want with neurodivergent minds? And what happens when you can't stop thinking about the wrong things?
For readers who loved Paul Tremblay's Horror Movie, Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties, and Catriona Ward's The Last House on Needless Street, The Chosen Tenant is a literary horror novel about neurodivergence, reality-bending terror, and the spaces that choose us.
Content warnings: Body horror, reality distortion, anxiety/ADHD representation, psychological distress, self-harm themes
428 pages, Paperback
Published February 19, 2026
1 person is currently reading
3 people want to read
About the author
Raymond Brunell
15 booksI write literary horror and speculative fiction that explores what happens when the structures we trust—language, consciousness, memory, time itself—start to collapse.
My self-published novels include The Memory Keepers Series (literary magical realism exploring neurodivergent perception, inherited trauma, and the boundaries between memory and reality), The Chosen Tenant (architectural horror about ADHD medication that literalizes every idiom in a haunted Victorian house), and standalone works examining consciousness, identity, and psychological dissolution.
In Faces in the Water, prosopagnosia becomes a supernatural gift when an artist discovers her neurological condition allows her to paint portraits of the disappeared—people preserved in a lake that archives consciousness itself. In The Chosen Tenant, Elliott's ADHD medication doesn't just sharpen his focus—it manifests every careless phrase into literal, physical form, creating an Archive of rooms he must document, contain, and survive.
I write about bodies that catalogue their own dissolution, algorithms that monetize grief, neurodivergent perception as gateway to otherworldly truth, and the small dignities we surrender to appear functional. My work examines what remains when human systems fail, when the dead persist in unexpected ways, and when attention becomes its own form of haunting.
My short fiction has appeared in over 40 publications including Necessary Fiction, TrashLight Press, PulpCult, Across the Margin, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Skeleton Flowers Press. I often employ experimental structures—second-person narration that interrogates complicity, procedural formats that spiral into horror, meta-narratives where the telling becomes as unstable as what's being told.
Born and raised in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I draw on the region's stark landscapes and long silences to explore themes of isolation, transformation, and the stories we tell when human language proves insufficient.
Find more of my work at www.unbound-atlas.com
My self-published novels include The Memory Keepers Series (literary magical realism exploring neurodivergent perception, inherited trauma, and the boundaries between memory and reality), The Chosen Tenant (architectural horror about ADHD medication that literalizes every idiom in a haunted Victorian house), and standalone works examining consciousness, identity, and psychological dissolution.
In Faces in the Water, prosopagnosia becomes a supernatural gift when an artist discovers her neurological condition allows her to paint portraits of the disappeared—people preserved in a lake that archives consciousness itself. In The Chosen Tenant, Elliott's ADHD medication doesn't just sharpen his focus—it manifests every careless phrase into literal, physical form, creating an Archive of rooms he must document, contain, and survive.
I write about bodies that catalogue their own dissolution, algorithms that monetize grief, neurodivergent perception as gateway to otherworldly truth, and the small dignities we surrender to appear functional. My work examines what remains when human systems fail, when the dead persist in unexpected ways, and when attention becomes its own form of haunting.
My short fiction has appeared in over 40 publications including Necessary Fiction, TrashLight Press, PulpCult, Across the Margin, Flash Fiction Magazine, and Skeleton Flowers Press. I often employ experimental structures—second-person narration that interrogates complicity, procedural formats that spiral into horror, meta-narratives where the telling becomes as unstable as what's being told.
Born and raised in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, I draw on the region's stark landscapes and long silences to explore themes of isolation, transformation, and the stories we tell when human language proves insufficient.
Find more of my work at www.unbound-atlas.com
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