In Your Shadow:

​Out now on Kindle.
​
Your life is not yours.
You've inherited history.

A child in Paris sees visions caused by a mysterious disease.  A Midwestern school teacher hunts down her church-burning student.  And a San Francisco suicide leads to a revolution.
 
Three characters, connected only by an unnamable dissatisfaction, forge new paths when they discover a family connection to unspeakable political crimes.  Inspired by the new science of epigenetics, which suggests traumatic experiences may be imprinted on our genes and affect our children (and their children too), In Your Shadow envisions how the Rwandan Genocide, the Native American Genocide, and the Holocaust still haunt three courageous individuals determined to live out their own lives, even when those lives have been defined by the mistakes of their ancestors.
 
In stories that span continents and generations, this book—part novel, part collection—weaves themes of family, belonging, exile, and redemption into a vision for the future where the past is never far behind.

You Are Not What You Seem:

Out now on Kindle.

A heartbroken factory worker lets scientists make a copy of him. A wife forgets how her husband's skeleton got into her cellar. And everyone in one white girl's town won't stop calling her Emily.

In this story collection, identities are mistaken, roles are reversed, and characters truly find themselves in the unlikeliest of places. 
​
With elements of literary fiction, sci-fi, horror, and autobiography, You Are Not What You Seem pushes the boundaries of genre to unearth the raw emotion beneath everyday life and make us rethink others and ourselves. ​

Nightmare in Silicon (Remix Edition):

Out now on Audible, Kindle, and paperback.

​Meet Ymo - the young, bold, sarcastic, and struggling test subject for medical trials - who decides to shed her gender, her body, and her ability to dream for a second chance at life as a robot.

​Fans of William Gibson and Margaret Atwood will be mesmerized by this fast-paced tale of survival in a not-too-distant future, seen through the eyes of a rebellious and free-spirited young woman coming to terms with who she is for the first time. But objectification of women takes on a whole new meaning in Ymo's binary world, where no one and nothing - not even one's own body - can be trusted. With a foreword by Matthew Derby and a new prologue by the author, this updated edition proves again why Alan Moore called Nightmare in Silicon beautiful, driven, and brave.

"Do you remember when Spielberg’s AI came out and every review seemed to mention that it had long been a pet project of Stanley Kubrick, and then went on to lament what an amazing creation it could have been in his hands? ...While in no way the same beast, Colette Phair’s debut Nightmare In Silicon is the closest analog to an imaginary Kubrick AI that you’re likely to find."
-Jeremy Robert Johnson (Verbicide Magazine), author of
The Loop and Entropy In Bloom

Purgatory:

Out now on Kindle.

The Church holds strict control over its citizens. But when scientists disprove God, the Church teams up with science to create its own heaven and hell on earth, harnessing the power of nanotechnology.

While an underground group of activists fight for free thought, Caetera, a solitary artist who misses nature from the old world, may hold the key to free the Church's test subjects. Meanwhile Timere and his sister Spera go respectively through heaven and hell, as one scientist questions his role in this new afterlife. Along with a couple of Caetera's neer-do-well party friends, who conduct their own experiment in being good, together the inhabitants of this sterile dystopia find that nothing is ever how you expect it'll be and forever isn't as long as it sounds.

"Darkly funny... disturbingly compelling."
-David Jay Brown, author of Dreaming Wide Awake and Conversations on the Edge of the Apocalypse

---

Permanence:

A long short story, a short book. Out now on Kindle.
​
Imagine a world where everything - your coffee table, your pet, your lover, even you - needs to be backed up in order to survive. Those objects and beings who aren't revert back to their old selves when last saved. That's the world Jeth and I live in. The monks are trying to take everything from us, but I'm going to hold on as tight as I need to - to him, and to the world I know.

“Wonderful... A marvelous story… has some lines and images that are priceless.”
- Zack Wentz, author of The Garbage Man and the Prostitute
​

Future Releases

Daydreams from the Future:

"A toxic-shock torrent of bad energy and beautiful language, Colette Phair's Nightmare in Silicon is recklessly brave and driven writing, brimming with fluorescent style and startling ideas. Hers is a strong voice that demands and deserves to be listened to.
-Alan Moore, author of Batman: The Killing Joke and V For Vendetta

Daydreams from the Future is the sequel to Nightmare in Silicon.

​The year is 5113. When Ymo wakes up from a millenia-long electronic slumber, zir robot body dug up by an actual robot construction worker, zir failed second chance at life becomes a third chance to live in a world that’s finally ready for zir. Zir old friends and enemies all dead and gone, Ymo quickly finds zie has a lot of growing up — and catching up — to do.

Embraced by a community of ageless genderfluid avatars in a world without male or female, Ymo sheds the physical shell that kept zir down in exchange for existence in a deceptively real cyberspace. Befriending the robot who saved zir, zie embarks on a quest to return the favor for the robot worker underclass, the only ones who don’t benefit from this utopia. Ymo explores sexual relationships with a sly and cocky archer named Cupid, a needy yet sweet programmer, and a fantasy Ymo may never touch, as the idea of parenthood looms over zir anew in the midst of the robot revolution.

This was supposed to be paradise, but the culture shock of a few thousand years away from society — along with an unfamiliar dialect, zir own outdated assumptions, and another new “normal” — makes Ymo wonder if zie will ever really belong anywhere.