{New Thriller Release} Stranger Still by George Ochoa

Stranger Still by George Ochoa
on August 19th, 2025
Genres: Fiction, Adult, Thriller
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Paul Inster, a brilliant, insane Columbia college student majoring in English with an undisclosed minor in knives, is in love with graduate student, Tracy Iridio. Seeing her in the library every day, he mistakenly believes she is in love with him and that she is a goddess, Teresa. In fact, the two have never met, and she does not know who he is. When, for the first time, he sees her with her boyfriend, classical history professor Larry Post, Paul sets out to destroy Larry via a campaign of terror. As the campaign mounts, Larry, mystified, tries to figure out who is attacking him and why. Through a series of surprises and confusions, the campaign escalates to murder.

Stranger Still is both a thriller and a literary novel, combining suspense and violence with rich language, webs of cultural allusions, and themes of love and madness.

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Exclusive Excerpt from Stranger Still

ON FRIDAY, October 14, the night I would later call our anniversary, I sat at home discouraged and, to try to cheer myself up, pulled out the red locked box from under my bed. Inside was emergency cash, and under the cash cheaply printed manuals with titles like Mastering the Blade, ordered from ads in mercenary and survivalist magazines. Under those were my knives.

Knives only, of course—no guns. Any idiot could kill with a gun; only an artist with a knife. My room contained other articles related to my pretense that I would one day be a serial killer, the way many gun owners pretend they will one day shoot down a gang of home invaders. As with most gun owners, it was only a hobby. I had no real intention of killing, only a sense of satisfaction in fantasizing about it. Most of the articles related to my dream career were behind a false wall in my closet: disguise materials, instructional videos, a mannequin for target practice. But the weapons in my red box were the most comforting items I owned.

I fingered the four stilettos, flicked open the switchblade. I toyed with the hunting knife and the combat knife. But my favorite blade was the dagger. It was a long, clean piece of steel, my mirrored face rippling in its double edges, the ebon hilt ribbed. Whenever I was in deepest despair, whenever all seemed a lie, from the time just after my mother’s death eight years ago to now, this knife preserved me, this knife shone bright against blackest doubt.

Yet now even the dagger seemed false. I would never use it. I had developed a proof that it was morally acceptable to kill, but I had never put it to the test. I would never make any real effort to leave a mark on the world, or even just touch someone, touch a woman, the way I wanted to touch Tracy. At twenty, I was still a virgin. I locked up the red box again and shoved it under my bed, Then I paced my room while a classical station played the Symphonie Fantastique.

How did Tracy feel about me? Without talking to her, I would have no way to know if she wanted me. We might live our whole lives harboring a secret love for each other. We would desire each other torridly, and only we would ever know. A theoretical question struck me—if, without speaking, she and I were somehow sure of the other’s love, wouldn’t that be enough? Couldn’t there be joy enough in the abstract certainty that we were loved?

The second movement of the symphony was playing, the madly reeling waltz. Philosophically, I have no problem with a lie. A nihilist at bottom, I am aware that nothing in the universe can be truly known and no source of love trusted. Therefore it is every man’s prerogative to make up lies and stick to them, or die in a whirlwind of doubt and disorientation. As long as my fictions are not irresolvably contradicted by sense experience, I am free to assign them all the validity of absolute truth. The only problem is a psychological one: how to transform a fiction regarded with pleasure into a truth believed absolutely.

I lay in bed listening to Berlioz and thinking about Tracy’s eyes. Irises shifting from brown to gold to green, hollows a sleepless mauve. If only I were sure those eyes were filled with love for me. If only I knew beyond a doubt that Tracy and I were made for each other. Her eyes seemed traced in the cracks of my ceiling, her mouth etched in plaster, her lips parted to speak.

Something was pushing inside my brain. It seemed to throb against a wad of tissue, a living fence with a primitive U-shaped bar locking the gate. To lift the bar would be dangerous, but the thing pushed and rattled, pulsing with an almost electronic buzz. My craving to let it enter was all but irresistible. With the effort of will required to flick on a radio, I unlocked the gate. And she called my name: “Paul.”