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.

Kindle Edition

Expected publication September 8, 2026

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.

Reviews

[Pranav Bhatnagar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Noir Falling: A Bizarre Mystery of Art and the Mind is truly one of those books that feels unlike anything I expected when I opened it. From the very beginning, Daniel Lowe is placed in a world that seems familiar for only a moment before something strange happens and makes you question what is real. Daniel himself is at the heart of that feeling because he is trying to understand who he is while having very little memory to hold on to, and I found that idea incredibly fascinating. His search for answers becomes much more than a normal mystery because he is also searching for a sense of himself. I loved the way art is used throughout the story. Paintings, drawings, shapes, colours and famous works of art are not simply there to make the setting look interesting; they become part of the strange world Daniel is trying to understand. Some of the scenes involving art are wonderfully bizarre, and I honestly had moments where I could almost feel my own mind trying to work out what I was looking at along with Daniel. The story also has a very unusual cast of characters, especially Voice, whose energy, strange way of thinking and completely unpredictable nature brought a lot of life to Daniel's journey. Their conversations about memory, identity, history, consciousness and what makes a person who they are gave the story a much deeper side without taking away from the mystery. I also really enjoyed the strange feeling that Daniel is always moving forward without fully knowing where he is going. One moment he is dealing with something that feels almost normal, and the next he is somewhere that seems to follow completely different rules. That constant uncertainty kept me curious because I never felt completely sure what Daniel would discover next. The mystery surrounding Isabella, MassZone, the missing people and the strange idea of Substance gives the story a strong reason to keep turning pages, while the art side adds something wonderfully unusual to the journey. I especially loved the feeling that Daniel is not simply trying to solve a mystery about other people; he is slowly trying to understand his own place in the world. That made his journey feel personal even when everything around him became completely strange. L. Andrew Cooper has created a story that is weird, clever, dark, funny in unexpected places and full of ideas about art, memory, identity and the human mind. I went into this book expecting a bizarre mystery, but what I found was a much bigger journey that made me stop and think about things I normally take for granted. If you enjoy stories that make you curious, make you question what you are seeing and invite you to discover their strange world for yourself, Noir Falling is absolutely a book worth picking up. I would rather not say too much about what Daniel finds because discovering that world is part of the fun, but I can say this: there were several moments when I simply had to keep reading because I wanted to understand what on earth was happening.