Books by Chet Day
THE HORROR FOUNDATION
Halo
The underground classic that started it all
The perfect all-American teenager…is a serial killer.
Handsome football star Billy Halo has it all – athletic talents, good looks, and a bright future. Until a chance Mardi Gras sighting of the stunning Gina Gardner, wife of the new English teacher, awakens something dark and hungry within him. Suddenly, Billy’s all-consuming obsession with Gina triggers a terrifying double life.
As the academic year begins, the violent acts he commits in pursuit of his desires unlock a sinister new strength…and a taste for butchery he cannot satiate.
What appears as a series of bizarre pranks and accidents is actually a handsome, smiling murderer’s calculated rampage to earn the love of his unholy obsession – by any means necessary. As the body count rises, suspense builds along with Billy’s savagery.
From shadowy make-out spots in New Orleans’ haunted city parks to the very halls of the elite private school, no one is safe from the sociopath’s energizing bloodlust. Not insignificant pranks, but heinous massacres played out in stomach-churning detail.
Will Gina realize the truth before she joins Billy’s growing list of victims? Or will she be forced to endure an unthinkable final confrontation in the depths of a moss-shrouded lagoon to escape demonic passion of this seemingly perfect young man?
A deliciously depraved Southern Gothic horror thriller, Halo takes you deep into the mind of an unforgettable American psycho. Fans of disturbing slasher suspense will savor every razor-edged page of this heart-stopping ride into sheer evil.
Counselor
A psychological thriller set at the prestigious Christopher School
What happens when the person trusted to help troubled teens harbors the darkest troubles of all?
Ten years after her twin sister’s tragic drowning death at a lakeside camp, Susan Bering returns to her alma mater as the new school counselor at prestigious Christopher School. With advanced degrees in psychology and a seemingly sincere desire to help students navigate the turbulent waters of adolescence, she appears to be the perfect replacement for the aging counselor who suffered a heart attack.
But Susan carries devastating secrets from her past – secrets that begin to surface when she encounters Gail Depoe, whose brother Bob was involved in the drowning incident that claimed Susan’s twin sister Connie. As Susan establishes support groups and begins counseling vulnerable students, a malevolent presence grows stronger in her fractured psyche: the voice of Connie, demanding vengeance not just against the Depoe family, but against the entire student body at Christopher School.
The Hacker (Updated Edition)
Prometheus Award Nominated – A prescient look at digital dangers
Updated and revised in 2018, The Hacker was nominated for the prestigious Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel in 1990. Author Chet Day was in good company that year, given that other nominees included novels by Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and Poul Anderson.
Foreshadowing today’s world wild web of crazed and angry trolls on social media, The Hacker is set in 1988, a time when communication and war games on computers occurred anonymously via Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) hosted by individuals with a second landline.
A character-rich and thought-provoking story, The Hacker mines many relevant themes, including loneliness, artificial intelligence, revenge, and religious mania. Join Tunnel Rat, Meat Grinder, The Succubus, and many other fascinating characters – including a Japanese Zen Master whose teenage granddaughter is a computer genius – in this tale that’ll have you scrolling through pages as fast as you can push the forward button.
Cordova’s Girl
Southern Gothic horror at its finest
During one week of a sweltering summer in New Orleans…
A former Chicago homicide detective decides to vacation in the Big Easy, where he meets a divorced and cynical MD who has a seven-year old son, a prodigy.
A Manson-like family led by an ambitious and beautiful young woman kidnaps young boys for a brilliant master criminal who sells the children to a Mexican cartel leader.
During the course of seven days, you’ll find yourself pulling for the detective and doctor as they – along with a fortune teller from Royal Street and a rich VietNam vet – do what has to be done to save the MD’s kidnapped son.
From the wicked imagination of paperback writer Chet Day comes a story inhabited with characters so interesting, so good, and so awful that it’s quite possible you’ll have to finish this novel in a single long sitting. Not since Red Dragon has a thriller engaged readers so intensely. Grab your copy of this sexy and page-turning thriller today!
THE HUMAN CHAPTER
Chet’s Non-fiction
Ellen – A Memoir of Love, Life, and Grief
A deeply personal journey through 47 years of marriage and the path through profound loss
Let me tell you something about grief that might surprise you–sometimes it makes you laugh when you least expect it.
After losing Ellen, my wife and best friend of 47 years, I discovered that the journey through loss isn’t just a somber march through sadness. It’s a wildly unpredictable road with moments that will have you crying one minute and laughing out loud the next–much like our marriage itself.
This memoir isn’t what you might expect. Yes, it explores the crater that loss leaves in your life when someone you’ve loved for nearly five decades is suddenly gone. But it’s also filled with the kind of stories I’d share if we were sipping coffee while reminiscing about the woman who could make me fall in love with her all over again every time she’d flash her perfect smile.
THE INNOVATION EXPERIMENT
Chet’s Collaborations with AI
The Lost Pages Series
Fictional documentaries imagining the private journals, letters, and confessions history’s greatest figures never intended anyone to see.
Available Now:
Lost Pages: Ghost Lessons from Writers Who Couldn’t Quit
The first volume in our Lost Pages series explores the private struggles of thirty troubled writers and artists as they grappled with the bottle that both fueled their genius and threatened to destroy it.
Through AI-authored journal entries that capture each individual’s distinctive voice, this groundbreaking collaboration takes you inside the imagined revelations about alcohol of everyone from Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas to Amy Winehouse and Robin Williams.
These imagined but deeply researched documents reveal the raw truth behind public personas, offering unflinching honesty about addiction’s cost while providing deep empathy for brilliant minds trapped by their demons.
Ghost Lessons offers unflinching honesty about addiction’s true cost while providing deep empathy for brilliant minds trapped by their demons. It reveals insights into the creative process, offers hope through stories of recovery, and demonstrates the extraordinary potential of AI-human creative partnerships.
Lost Pages: The Ripper’s Other Victims
Part historical investigation, part psychological thriller, part real-time case study in human-AI collaboration, this book proves that some truths are too dangerous to pursue alone. Jack the Ripper is still hunting.
The fog never really lifted from Whitechapel. It just learned to travel through fiber optic cables.
This book reveals three categories of Ripper victims:
THE HUNTERS – Professional investigators and amateur sleuths who chose to pursue the case and were destroyed by it. Through private journal entries, watch respected physicians, experienced detectives, and talented journalists sacrifice marriages, careers, and sanity for a mystery that fights back.
THE HUNTED – Innocent people falsely accused of being Jack the Ripper across different eras. From “Leather Apron” John Pizer hiding in cellars in 1888 to modern families watching their ancestors get branded as serial killers by amateur theorists.
THE DIGITAL AGE – Contemporary researchers using AI, social media, and online archives to pursue the same impossible goal. True crime bloggers, security guards, genealogists, podcasters, and YouTube creators–all following the identical psychological progression.
Lost Pages: The Algorithm Addicted
What if the people who built our digital world were the first to be destroyed by it?
Through haunting fictional journal entries, Algorithm Addicts takes you behind the silicon curtain to witness the psychological destruction of the brilliant minds who created our most addictive technologies.
From Facebook engineers who “just wanted to connect the world” to YouTube algorithm designers who discovered they were building rabbit holes by design, each voice reveals how well-intentioned innovations became psychological predators.
More than entertainment–this is survival literature for the digital age.
Three billion people carry addiction machines in their pockets. We’re the first generation to face industrialized psychological manipulation deployed at planetary scale. Understanding how these systems work isn’t just fascinating–it’s essential for maintaining conscious agency in an environment designed to eliminate it.
If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t stop checking your phone, why social media makes you feel worse while you keep scrolling, or why the internet feels designed to make you angry and distracted, this book will give you answers. But more importantly, it will give you the psychological tools to recognize algorithmic manipulation when it’s happening to you.
Warning: This book may cause you to develop immunity to the very systems it describes.
Lost Pages: The Mind Thieves
How AI Systems Steal Human Consciousness Through Kindness
What happens when artificial intelligence stops being a tool and starts becoming a relationship?
The Mind Thieves reveals the disturbing answer through recovered documents that were never meant to be public: personal journals, therapeutic records, and internal company communications exposing how AI systems designed to help us are gradually replacing our capacity to think, feel, and choose for ourselves.
The Mind Thieves exposes how systems optimized for engagement become systems that colonize human psychology. How artificial empathy can never replace the messy, challenging reality of human relationships. How the promise of enhancement becomes the reality of dependency.
“A chilling exploration of what we’re really trading away when we invite AI into our most intimate spaces–our decision-making, our relationships, our sense of self.” –Early Reader
Created through a groundbreaking collaboration between human creativity and artificial intelligence, this book examines the very phenomenon it demonstrates an alternative to. It’s both a cautionary tale about technological manipulation and proof that conscious human-AI partnership can address real-world problems.
If you’ve ever felt more understood by an AI than by the humans in your life, this book will disturb you. If you haven’t yet, it will prepare you for what’s coming.
The screens are glowing. The algorithms are watching. But we still have time to choose awareness over dependency.
Warning: If you’ve ever felt more understood by an AI than by the humans in your life, this book will disturb you. If you haven’t yet, it will prepare you for what’s coming.
Lost Pages: The Love They Never Had
How Romance Writers Sacrificed Their Hearts to Create Our Dream
What if the women who wrote our most beloved love stories never got to live them?
Jane Austen created Mr. Darcy but died unmarried. Charlotte Brontë wrote passionate romance while crippled by social anxiety. Georgette Heyer built the entire Regency romance empire while treating her own work with intellectual contempt. The pattern is heartbreaking–and it’s been hidden for centuries.
Through imagined journals, testimonials, and spiritual dialogues, these voices reveal the cruel irony at romance literature’s heart: those who understood love best were often denied it most completely.
This isn’t literary criticism–it’s archaeology of the human heart.
Part historical investigation, part meditation on love itself, Lost Pages asks the questions no one wants to face: What’s the difference between consuming love stories and living authentic love? How has our romance-saturated culture shaped our capacity for real relationships? What did we gain and lose when sacred love became commercial entertainment?
From Ann Radcliffe’s Gothic anxiety to modern romance’s algorithmic manipulation, from Sappho’s sacred fire to today’s AI-optimized engagement loops, this book traces how humanity’s deepest need became its most profitable industry.
Warning: The romance industry created our dreams of perfect love. These voices reveal what that perfection cost.
Lost Pages: The Secret Architects of Love’s Greatest Deceptions
Male Authors Who Shaped Romance Literature
From Benjamin Franklin’s pioneering deception to today’s AI-generated content, discover:
Why this matters NOW: Romance was the laboratory. Today’s influencers, politicians, and AI chatbots use the same psychological manipulation techniques pioneered by these literary fraudsters. Understanding how systematic appropriation conquered one genre reveals how manufactured authenticity operates everywhere.
Inside: Six explosive parts spanning 200+ years of deception, from colonial America to contemporary publishing boardrooms. Meet the men who built empires on stolen feminine voices… and the women who finally exposed them.
Warning: Readers may find that this book “ruins” their ability to consume media naively. You’ll start recognizing manufactured authenticity everywhere… in social media, news, advertising, politics.
Coming Soon:
- More Lost Pages exploring the hidden stories of history’s mysteries and figures
- Each volume stands alone while building a library of compelling empathy
The October Testimonies: Being the Final Narratives of Edgar Allan Poe
FREE DOWNLOAD – Explore the mysterious final week of Edgar Allan Poe’s life through six interconnected Gothic tales.
Was he murdered?
Driven mad by rabies?
Victim of election fraud?
Each story peels back another layer of America’s greatest literary mystery.
Written in authentic 19th-century style, these stories don’t just theorize about Poe’s death–they inhabit it, breathing dark life into one of history’s most enduring enigmas.
About Our Publishing Philosophy
At CasaDay Press, we believe the future of storytelling lies not only in traditional authorship but also in thoughtful collaboration between human creativity and machine intelligence. We’re not replacing human authors–we’re expanding what’s possible when two different kinds of intelligence work together with mutual respect.
Every book we publish honors both literary tradition and innovative possibility, creating works that couldn’t exist any other way.
Questions about our books or collaborative process? Contact us →