Name: 813
Author: Dr. Jeff Bullock

The anatomy of that night

813Hz

the carrier tone buried beneath the bass

73sec

how long it played before she cut the power

47/ 200

who turned in a room that trusted her

11:47PM

the minute the city began to come apart

These are the coordinates of the novel's first seventy-three seconds. Everything after is Camille learning what she set loose, and what it wrote into her.

The premise

She reads a room the way a surgeon reads a pulse. One night the room read back.

Camille Folarin has spent eight years learning to feel a crowd tip before it tips. A producer she has never met, who signs his messages NULL, sends her a track with a single number for a subject line. It carries a sub-bass layer her monitors can reach and her ears cannot, a pressure she feels behind her eyes and in her back teeth.

She plays it on a Friday night in a converted furniture warehouse on Third Street. The people who turn are not the ones closest to the speakers. They are scattered across the whole floor, as though something marked them before she ever pressed play.

Sound is the trigger. Silence is the only camouflage. And the frequency was moving through the city in small doses long before the night she made it loud.

Why this one is different

Most outbreak stories follow the survivors. 813 follows the source.

The person at the center of this collapse is the one who caused it. Camille carries the file that started it, the ear that can take it apart, and the guilt of forty-seven faces she can still name. That combination makes her the most dangerous person left alive, and the only one who can undo any of it.

The horror here is grounded and close. Row houses on the Hill. The canal towpath that carries sound like the inside of a speaker cabinet. The rusting Steel Stacks where one man walls off a compound and learns to aim the frequency at the people outside. A city you can walk, told by a narrator who hears it in frequencies.

"Do not play this for anyone who has already heard it before."

The one line in NULL's email she read too late.

For readers who like the grounded dread of Station Eleven, the propulsion of The Girl With All the Gifts, and a city rendered close enough to touch.

Read the opening

Day 1 · 11:47 PM · Club Threshold, Third Street, South Side Bethlehem

The bass finds her sternum before anything else. It always does. Two hundred bodies in a room built for one hundred fifty, and the low end has nowhere to go but through her.

She has a track she has been holding for two weeks, something a producer sent her from a burner email. She has never met him. She knows him only as NULL. There is a layer in the low end her monitors pick up and her ears do not quite reach, a vibration she feels behind her eyes, in the soft tissue of her throat, in her back teeth.

The change does not start in the front row, which is the first thing that is wrong.

She cut the power at seventy-three seconds. She got out. She still has the laptop. She does not know what she just did. She does know it was her.

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Inside the novel

Five days. Three movements. A sound that keeps changing what it wants.

Movement One

The Room

Club Threshold at 11:47 PM. The drop, the turning, and a walk home through a South Side that is learning a new language. Camille finds the carrier tone hiding in plain sight at 813 Hz.

Movement Two

The Hill

Silence as camouflage. Connie, who reads a street the way Camille reads a room. A methodical stranger building routes and barricades in the dark. And the discovery that the changed come in tiers, and some of them are cataloging the living.

Movement Three

The Furnace

A walled compound at the Steel Stacks, a counter-signal that holds the changed back, and a man named Greer who wraps a lie around the sound and broadcasts it. Camille answers with the real frequency, and with what it has written into her own body.

Underneath the collapse runs a quieter reckoning. Camille was partly exposed too. The frequency is a passenger she carries, and by the last day she has to decide whether she is a thing the sound happens to, or an instrument she can learn to play.

The people who carry it

Camille Folarin, twenty-seven, a DJ and producer who played the track and became the only person who understands the frequency.
Connie, who has survived on the South Side for decades and reads danger in the shape of a silence.
Dev Patel, nineteen and alone since the first night, who has to choose which order to belong to.
Darius, methodical and quiet, building infrastructure across the Hill before anyone asks, with a sister on the other side of the change.
Greer, the man who walled off the Steel Stacks, learned to aim the sound, and called his version the truth.
NULL, the producer who sent the track, and the warning Camille read too late.

Get the book

Choose your format.

813 is out now. Read the opening chapter free, then pick up the full book on Amazon.

Ebook

Kindle · Apple Books · Kobo

The full novel, on your device in about a minute.

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Paperback

Print edition via Amazon

The cover on your shelf. Print edition fulfilled through Amazon.

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Audiobook

Narrated edition · on Spotify

The whole book read aloud. Out now, narrated in full.

Listen on Spotify

Available now on Amazon, with the narrated edition on Spotify.

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The author

Dr. Jeff Bullock, PharmD

Jeff earned a PharmD at Xavier University of Louisiana and spent eighteen years at CVS, rising from clerk to district leader, before founding the AI consultancy PRISM. He builds companies for a living and thinks in systems, which is why a story about a single frequency loose in a working city would not leave him alone.

813 grew out of the Lehigh Valley he knows. The South Side of Bethlehem, the Hill above the flood plain, the canal towpath, and the Steel Stacks that a city turned from a graveyard into a stage. The novel takes that real geography and runs one impossible sound through it, then follows the one person who can hear exactly what it does.

PharmD, Xavier University of Louisiana
Eighteen years at CVS, clerk to district leader
Founder, PRISM AI Consultants
Author of literary fiction rooted in real places and real history

MANSA The Black Advantage The Intelligence Loop drjeffbullock.com

Questions

Before it launches.

When does 813 come out?

813 is out now. Read Chapter 1 today, and pick up the full book on Amazon whenever you are ready.

What kind of book is it?

A grounded literary thriller with a speculative edge. It reads like a survival story with the tension of horror, told in close third person from inside the head of Camille Folarin, a DJ who hears the world in frequencies. Atmospheric, propulsive, and set in a real city.

Do I need to know Bethlehem to follow it?

No. The South Side, the Hill, the canal, and the Steel Stacks are drawn from the real Lehigh Valley, but the novel carries the geography inside the story. If you have never set foot in Pennsylvania, you will still know exactly where you are standing.

Is this a series?

813 stands on its own, and it opens a door. The ending sets Camille on a road with a great deal still to learn about what she carries, which leaves room for more. Leave your email and you will be first to hear what comes next.

What formats will it come in?

Ebook and paperback at launch, with a narrated audiobook planned for after. Choose your format below.

Seventy-three seconds of a sound no one should have heard.