The Substitute Teacher: A Novel

The forbidding, festering story of a new substitute teacher who encounters ancient entities in his old fifth grade classroom, told entirely through found documents—a black mold-covered Weapons from the acclaimed author of The Ship of Death.

Broke and overqualified, Paul Burrows returns to his hometown to sub for his old fifth grade teacher. If academia won’t have him yet, he’ll study the classroom itself—field notes, observations. Something to salvage the year.

The classroom is unsettling from the start. Fifteen strange, calm children, a shy ferret with no searchable species, lesson plans decades old with instructions no one can decode. Paul keeps documenting, but the notes that begin as detached academic observation slowly become something else. A record of events he can’t explain. Children disappearing into the forest at night. Dust-covered old boxes in his father’s attic, full of papers he can’t remember writing, surfacing buried memories. And a teacher whose absence grows more sinister the longer he looks.

Told through letters, field notes, newspaper clippings, community forum posts, and recordings, The Substitute Teacher is as dark and possessed as chalk writing itself on a board. It’s the desperately documented story for the truth of what happened to Paul’s mother, to his students, to himself—and for the door between worlds that might still be open.