PSYCHOSX: The Hunter is Haunted

Book 2 of Charmay: New York Noir

By Maggie Moor

I’M WATCHING YOU.

Across a paranoid, post-9/11 landscape spanning New York,  London, and Tunisia, a trauma-haunted singer-songwriter Charmay, operating under a new alias, is pushed deep into the orbit of a mercurial horror filmmaker—only to have the details of her real life weaponized to trap her inside a brutal, real-time performance.

A dark psychological suspense novel with the intense voice of a literary masterpiece, it takes readers on a post-punk, noir-poetic psychological journey through a mind under pressure. Explores the intersections of addiction, art, and surveillance against a paranoid, post-9/11 landscape spanning Manhattan and Europe.

PSYCHOSX: The Hunter is Haunted is a volatile, hyper-observant blend of literary noir and trauma narrative. It follows a woman trying to survive the aftermath of addiction who transforms herself into a hunter—operating as a private investigator, sexual performer, and spy—only to discover she is ultimately hunting the ghosts inside herself.

Moving from the intimate trauma of an overdose to the global fractures of 9/11, Germany, and London, the narrative explores a gripping triangulation of personal collapse, historical catastrophe, and predatory power.

THE FALL. THE HUNTER. THE CAPTIVITY. 

2001, the line between performance and survival is razor-thin.

Operating under the alias Dusty Rose, Charmay is an actress, singer, and part-time private investigator trying to mask the aftermath of trauma and escalating addiction. When she takes a routine surveillance assignment to trail a New York director to a small film festival in Germany, she expects a clean, fast sting.

Then the towers fall.

Stranded in Europe by the closure of post-9/11 airspace, Charmay is pulled into London and the volatile orbit of Zaz, a charismatic horror filmmaker. When the PI firm suspects Zaz of covert international connections, they push Charmay to investigate his world. —— the surveillance cuts both ways.

Zaz steals her laptop. Inside it, he finds the raw fragments of her past—the things she has spent years trying to keep hidden. He announces a new project: a highly salable science-fiction film.

Once production begins, the script starts to disappear. Zaz strips away fiction and replaces it with Charmay’s own life, weaponizing the details of her trauma and forcing her into a brutal, real-time performance.

The Trajectory

Production moves across remote locations in Tunisia, France, and Greece.

The cameras never stop.

In a paranoid landscape where images double as evidence and every frame can become a weapon, rehearsal and reality begin to collapse into each other.

Who is performing? Who is watching? Who is being hunted?

While Charmay spirals deeper into a chemical fog in New York, Zaz tightens his psychological grip in Europe.

To survive, she will have to strip away every mask—including the bottle—before the final act finishes what her husband’s sudden death started.

This is for the lonely ones—you are at the heart of the truth.

THE HUNTERS ARE HAUNTED

• Cahill: Her PI Handler. Sharp, ex NYPD; setting up her next missions. Is he grooming her or setting her up to take the fall? 
• Toby: A career bartender at Pianos Bar, a friend; hoping to change Charmay to fit the comrfortable life he offers.
• Johnson: An international attorney; Darling’s Club client with a hovering mother; penthouse embodies security as entrapment.
• Lolo: Piano player at Pianos Bar; A mute Vietnam vet soothing her with his presence, giving breath.
• Val: The gender-bent bartender at Darling’s Club; a portal into a world where empowerment and disintegration combine.
• The Echoes: Ancestral wreckage and past trauma hang in every crevice if space.
• The City: Grimy post-9/11 streets speaking to her in a lingering haunting of death.

PSYCHOSX WORLD

2001 New York & London

As Zaz’s film rolls on record, the script takes them to remote locations in Tunisia, France, and Greece. The walls close in and the mind twists into memory, film, and scriptwriting, where the scene becomes the reality and the past informs the script. The cameras never stop rolling; the nightmares and seductions are lethal.

Charmay rolls to dark cement corners of booze-laden New York and, half-slipped, watches herself on national TV. Sliding further into hallucination, lucid dreams, finite consciousness, and near-death—while the Afghanistan covert arms and drugs investigation with Cahill and the Zaz interrogation, masked as a film wrap, move toward final conclusions. The book burns; the flame concentrates; the final pulse leads Charmay to a death that breeds new life.