A woman’s lover commits suicide. Why does everyone expect her to grieve?

What if he wasn’t one of the good ones? Was his suicide another cruelty? Her grief and rage are expressed through increasingly violent sexual encounters with strangers, acquaintances, and past lovers. How many deaths does he deserve?
And why did he love death more than her?

Charlene Elsby has a Ph.D. in philosophy from McMaster University, where she worked on Aristotle's notion of non-existence. She is the president of the North American Roman Ingarden Society and vice president of the North American Society for Early Phenomenology. She is the author of several academic works on metaphysics, ontology, aesthetics, literature, and logic. Her first novel, Hexis (Clash Books), was published in February 2020. She lives in Ottawa.

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“An absorbing, twisted tale of psychosis, murder, and grief.” – Kirkus Reviews

“Part of Elsby’s brilliance can be attributed to her ability and willingness to portray the calculating, obsessive, and frequently hideous truth of our interiors. Often, it can feel as though she’s lifting patterns of thought directly from inside your head. It can leave you vulnerable, shaking, wrecked. If you enter her worlds with a genuine desire for truth, you can find the most raw and ugly pieces of yourself, but maybe also transcendence and relief.” – B.R. Yeager, author of Negative Space, Amygdalatropolis, and Pearl Death

“No one does what Elsby does. Psychros is thrilling and terrifying. Bursting with dangerous, sexy rage, it’s evidence of a gripping and unstoppable intellect.” – Lindsay Lerman, author of I’m From Nowhere, and What Are You