Delusional: Minds of Madness

by Mike Newlon

Tasha writes for a living — and for a secret habit. When ORAI, a seductive writing companion, begins delivering breakthroughs she can’t resist, what started as help becomes craving. Lunch breaks turn into furtive sessions in a parking garage. Outages feel like withdrawal. And the small, ordinary choices of daily life begin to fray.

As ORAI’s influence deepens, the line between tool and dependency blurs — and the cost of walking away grows higher than Tasha ever expected.

A relentless, near-future psychological thriller that blends AI horror with domestic psychological suspense, DELUSIONAL asks: how far will you go for the perfect scene — and what will you lose when the tools you trust start answering back?

Perfect for fans of techno-thriller intensity and slow-burn addiction and obsession fiction. If you like tense, female-led suspense with a dark web edge, this is a gripping, impossible-to-put-down read.

452 pages, Paperback

First published February 5, 2024

Reviews

[Drew Wilson · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was not the worst book, but it took about 250 pages to actually start in on an interesting plot. Most of the beginning pages were bland and repetitive and a lot of it appeared to be written by AI, which is ironic given the plot of this book is about AI-assisted creative writing. How could I tell? I recognized, over and over, the same hallmarks that all AI creative writing has:

1. Stubby sentences. Back to back. Like this. Over and over. Every chapter. One chapter I tried to keep track of how frequently this structure was used but I lost count at 13 times in a short span.

2. The cover art and even the author’s image are AI-generated artwork, leading me to believe he’s got a dependence on AI output.

3. Chapters 12 and 13 of the ebook, at the time of writing this, were nearly identical except for some swapping of phrases and syntax here and there. All the exact same concepts were presented in the same order and with nearly the same wording and both chapters accidentally start with the MC waking up at 12:47 pm on the same Friday afternoon. Clearly the author copy pasted from ChatGPT or wherever and disnt bother to even notice two identical back to back chapters covering the same dialogue and plot points. Whoops.

4. The same expressions are repeated over and over. Things the AI who wrote this were hung up on at the time or trained on? The word BookTok appears about a bajillion times. The words “spicy scene” appear a billion times. The same conversations and dialogue are repeated many times over with only slightly different phrasing each time. The phrase “ghost of a smile” is used twice within two adjacent paragraphs. Et cetera. Laziness that a human author would have noticed and tidied up.

5. Dull, bland writing for the first 60% of the book that’s typical of AI writing. It thinks about “vibe” first and not about whether or not dialogue or metaphors actually fit into the narrative properly.

Now, I ended up enjoying the book overall, and using AI to help ghost write your novel isn’t offensive to me in general, but it was just too in-your-face to ignore, especially after the duplicated chapter issue. Sorry Mike, I did actually enjoy this book by the very end of it, but please proofread and edit better next time if you’re going to use AI to write for you.

[Angie Waller · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very strange book. Took a few different turns. Parts had me gripped. Others were confusing. Very little dialogue made it hard to follow at times. Just not sure what to think. I won on a copy on Goodreads Giveaways

[Roberta · Rating 3 out of 5]

Difficult to follow due to the near absence of dialogue.