Charlie Porter’s prequel to the award-winning, Shallcross (2014), Flame Vine is a novel that takes a deep dive into living with the chaos of hearing voices and the search for safe places to shelter from the storm.

A tightly-woven tale with themes of self-erasure, fear, hallucination and the joys in between, Flame Vine carries the reader through the life of Aubrey Shallcross which happens to be punctuated by schizophrenic episodes shared by Triple Suiter and Amper Sand, the voices in Aubrey’s head.

In a masterful way Porter transports the reader into the world of voice hearers, introducing us to the good voices – and the bad – to self-medication through addiction, and acting out on impulses.

The condition of hearing voices is not always pathological, and many voice hearers do not come forward or tell anyone for fear of being discriminated against. This is not a story about paranormal powers, nor is it fantasy or magic realism. This fictional piece is taken from the real world, the scientific world, and South Florida’s cultural landscape, except Porter’s theory about slippers-voices one hears in their head that live on the neuronal roads and in the vast, unknown spandrels of the brain. The reader does not have to believe in slippers, but the author does.