Book Extract: The Hearing Voices Series By Charles Porter

Published April 24, 2026 | By Laura

It’s such a pleasure to be welcoming Charles Porter to Novel Kicks and the blog tour for The Hearing Voices Series.

At a certain point, the way you experience things starts to affect everyday decisions, how you respond to people, what you trust, and how you move through situations that used to feel simple. For Aubrey Shallcross, that shift has been building for years, shaped by the voices he hears as he works, forms relationships, and tries to stay in control of his life. The Hearing Voices Series by Charles Porter follows how that begins to change what everyday life looks like.

Aubrey Shallcross has learned how to keep his life steady, even with voices that never leave. He works, maintains relationships, and moves through the world with a sense of control that, from the outside, appears solid.

But the voices don’t stay in the background.

They surface in moments that matter, when decisions have to be made quickly, when situations escalate, when the wrong move can set something in motion. Sometimes they guide. Sometimes they push.

And sometimes, they lead him straight into situations he can’t easily step out of.

As tensions build around him, in the people he’s connected to and the environments he’s drawn into, Aubrey finds himself acting before he fully understands why. What follows isn’t contained. The consequences spread outward, turning individual decisions into events that carry far beyond him.

By the time he realizes the scale of what he’s part of, he’s already committed.

Charles has kindly shared an extract from Shallcross: Flame Vine, the second novel in The Hearing Voices Series with us today. We hope you enjoy.

*****beginning of extract*****

Chapter 2: Aubrey

JULY 1952

“When you walk the seawall, don’t look at your feet or you’ll fall, kid!” Paul Gray said.

That’s me on the wall. Aubrey. My last name is Shallcross. I am eight years old, and I am an only child. I live in Stuart, Florida, on the St. Lucie River that goes to the Atlantic Ocean. In the summer, we are all scared of polio and our typhoid shots, and we have them big smallpox scars on our arms. I’m a white kid. It’s a time the grownups call seg- segra-gation.

The river is a mile wide by my house. You can follow it the other way through the St. Lucie canal and cross Lake Okeechobee and go out the Caloosa-somethin River to the Gulf of Mexico, then to New Orleans if you want, my daddy said.

My river is full of silver mullet in the summer, and them snook hunt ’em like water wolves, my daddy said, too. I lie with my head in the upstairs window at night when it’s really hot, and I can hear gazillions of them mullet jumping over the water to keep ahead of the wolves. They sound like rain. In the winter, the black and white wild ducks come to sit on the river like old Yankees sit on our benches downtown. My momma said there must be a special place in hell for people from New Jersey.

I have a needlefish skull tied around my neck, like the other boys on the river. It hangs there next to my Miraculous Medal with Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the two of them bounce together when I run up the bank to my grandmother’s house. She sits on her sofa and says her rosary every day. Momma says Grandmother is old fashioned, like this dead queen in England named Victoria. She sits there, her dress pulled up on her leg for her sugar diabetes shot. Once, before I was born, my grandmother lived in Italy to be closer to the Pope. She liked that Musso-, Musso-lini man, too, because he made the trains run on time. Momma says Grandmother is in a club called John Birch, and she thinks there is a communist under every bed.

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About Charles Porter –

Charles Porter is the author of the award-winning Hearing Voices series, a collection of literary novels rooted in the lived experience of hearing voices.

Rather than approaching the subject clinically, Porter explores it through story — examining how people build full, complex lives while navigating forms of perception often misunderstood or labeled as disorder. His work engages with questions around consciousness, culture, and the boundaries of what we consider typical human experience.

The first novel in the series, Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral, was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2014, with later titles also receiving critical recognition.

Porter divides his time between Florida and Massachusetts, where he works with horses and continues to write.

For more information, visit his website. You can also connent on Goodreads – Shallcross: The Blindspot Cathedral, Shallcross: Flame Vine and Shallcross: Animal Slippers.

Click to buy the series on Amazon UK and Amazon US.