Not All Darkness Is Created Equal. Forman’s Is Alive

SEETHINGS III (Released December 2025)

Author Michael Forman

ISBN-13:	9798231769254
Language:	English
Words:	90,090

Readers who gravitate toward the psychological precision of Gillian Flynn, the domestic dread of Paula Hawkins, or the moral murk of Ottessa Moshfegh will find Michael Forman’s SEETHINGS III operating in a similarly charged atmosphere—but with a distinctly Australian humidity clinging to every page.

Forman isn’t interested in the sensationalism that drives so many commercial thrillers. Instead, like Flynn’s Sharp Objects or Moshfegh’s Eileen, he excavates the quiet rot within relationships, revealing how intimacy can become corrosive long before violence ever appears.

What sets SEETHINGS III apart is its climate-driven pacing. The novel moves with the slow, oppressive weight of Brisbane’s subtropical heat, a pacing reminiscent of Megan Abbott’s The End of Everything, where mood becomes architecture and tension swells incrementally rather than explosively. Forman stretches scenes until they hum with friction, letting paranoia and longing simmer rather than boil.

In character work, SEETHINGS III sits comfortably alongside the morally ambiguous interiors crafted by Caroline Kepnes in You. Mitchell, Samantha, Sandra, and Felicity are not villains or victims—they’re pressure systems. They move, collide, and corrupt with the realism of people whose desires exceed their emotional capacities. Forman normalizes the darker impulses of human nature with the same unflinching clarity that Bret Easton Ellis brought to The Rules of Attraction, but without Ellis’s performative detachment. Forman is more intimate, more invasive.

If there’s a caveat, it’s that readers accustomed to rapid-fire plotting may need to recalibrate. Forman builds suspense structurally, not sensationally. But for those familiar with the slower psychological burn of authors like Patricia Highsmith or Laura Lippman, SEETHINGS III feels like a worthy addition to the lineage—an atmospheric, morally dense novel that rewards readers who appreciate darkness delivered with precision rather than spectacle.

SEETHINGS III is available from Smashwords (eBook) and Barnes & Noble (hard copy).