Books by Chet Day
Autobiography and Memoir
Wicked Imagination
57 Dead Witnesses Audit an Old Man’s Life
What happens when a 78-year-old writer invites the dead to audit his soul?
Chet Day wrote nineteen raw, unguarded vignettes about his life: his abusive grandfather, his broken parents, his forty-seven-year marriage to a woman whose depths he never fully sounded, the sons he loved from a distance, and the work that consumed him. Then his AI collaborator, Anthropic’s Claude, selected fifty-seven deceased historical figures and wrote their responses.
Each chapter follows the same structure: Chet writes a memory. Three dead people respond to it. Chet responds to them. Then the next memory surfaces, and the cycle begins again. No chapter was planned in advance. Each emerged from whatever the previous exchange shook loose — the way memory actually works, associatively rather than chronologically.
The expert voices disagree with each other, bring their own biases, and are sometimes wrong. Chet pushes back, concedes, gets angry, changes his mind, and occasionally discovers something about himself he did not know before he sat down to write.
Part autobiography, part literary experiment, part genuine human-AI collaboration — this is a book that could not have been written by either participant alone.
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 Thriller Foundation
The underground classic that started it all
Halo
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. 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.
From shadowy make-out spots in New Orleans’ haunted city parks to the halls of an elite private school, no one is safe from the sociopath’s energizing bloodlust. A deliciously depraved Southern Gothic horror thriller, Halo takes you deep into the mind of an unforgettable American psycho.
Featured in Grady Hendrix’s Paperbacks from Hell.
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, Susan Bering returns to her alma mater as the new school counselor at Christopher School. With advanced degrees and a seemingly sincere desire to help students, she appears to be the perfect hire.
But Susan carries devastating secrets — secrets that surface when she encounters a student whose brother was involved in the drowning that claimed her twin. 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.
The Hacker (Updated Edition)
Prometheus Award Nominated – A prescient look at digital dangers
Nominated for the Prometheus Award for best science fiction novel in 1990 — alongside Robert Heinlein, Joe Haldeman, and Poul Anderson.
Set in 1988, when communication and war games on computers occurred anonymously via Bulletin Board Systems hosted by individuals with a second landline, The Hacker foreshadowed today’s world of crazed and angry trolls on social media. A character-rich story mining themes of loneliness, artificial intelligence, revenge, and religious mania. Join Tunnel Rat, Meat Grinder, The Succubus, and a Japanese Zen Master whose teenage granddaughter is a computer genius in this tale that’ll have you scrolling pages as fast as you can push the forward button.
Updated and revised in 2018.
Cordova’s Girl
Southern Gothic horror at its finest
During one week of a sweltering summer in New Orleans, a former Chicago homicide detective vacationing in the Big Easy meets a divorced and cynical MD with a seven-year-old prodigy son.
Meanwhile, a Manson-like family led by an ambitious young woman kidnaps boys for a master criminal who sells children to a Mexican cartel leader.
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.
Retellings of Classic Novels
The White Whale
Melville’s Moby Dick as Thriller
A whaling ship leaves Nantucket on Christmas Day. Its captain has told the crew they are hunting whales. He has lied.
Captain Ahab has commandeered the Pequod for a private war against Moby Dick — the white whale that took his leg and left him alive to know what was taken. Ishmael signs aboard because the alternative is a pistol. He finds Queequeg, a harpooner whose quiet, immovable acceptance of the world becomes the counterweight to everything Ahab represents.
The White Whale is a contemporary adaptation reimagined as a literary thriller for modern readers. It preserves Melville’s essential characters, plot, and thematic architecture — obsession against acceptance, the cost of principle without action, the question of whether the universe is hostile or merely indifferent — while cutting the cetological digressions that have kept generations of readers from one of the most powerful stories ever written.
This is the Moby-Dick you were supposed to read in school but didn’t. Told by a grieving man who came to sea to die and chose, against all odds, to live.
Dracula
A Psychological Retelling of Stoker’s Classic
Jonathan Harker notices everything. That is why the Count chose him.
England, 1893. A young solicitor travels to Transylvania to close a property sale and finds a client who listens the way no one has ever listened to him — who asks the right questions, praises the right competencies, and makes him feel, for the first time in his life, perfectly understood. By the time Jonathan understands what that understanding is for, the doors are already locked.
Five narrators tell the story in five distinct voices. This is not a thriller. It is a slow-burning, deeply interior novel of psychological horror — faithful to Stoker’s structure, radical in its reading of it. If you’ve ever suspected the most frightening thing in Stoker’s novel is not the vampire’s teeth but his attention, this book was written for you.
The ending will not hand you a body. It will hand you the evidence, and let you live with it.
Read a sample:
The Borgo Pass — Entry 3
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s Classic as Psychological Thriller
Victor Frankenstein will tell you what happened. He will tell you beautifully. He is lying, and he does not know it.
Victor’s mother dies of a fever — four days, start to finish, arbitrary and biological and ugly. He cannot live in a world that permits this. So he goes to Ingolstadt and builds something that will not die. It opens its eyes. It is hideous. He runs from the room, and he never stops running.
Three narrators tell this story, and no two of them are describing the same man. Victor explains himself. The Creature contradicts him without knowing he is doing it. Elizabeth measures the man against the evidence and gets close enough to name the pattern, never close enough to name the cause. The reader holds all three and understands what none of them can.
For readers who have always suspected that the real monster in Shelley’s book was never the thing on the table.
He dies on the ice, alone, mid-sentence, still certain of it.
The last chapter belongs to the thing he made.
Chet’s Literary Fiction
The Yellow Wallpaper: A Documentary Archive
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Story as the Last Page of a File
Nobody in this house is a villain. That is the problem.
In May of 1889 a Boston physician signs a lease on a country house and brings his wife there for the summer to rest. By the end of August the paper has been torn off the walls of the upstairs room.
Thirty-five documents survive from that summer: the lease, with its covenant against alteration. The doctor’s day book, where his wife is entered between a harness maker’s ulcerated leg and the state of the roads. His sister’s cheerful letters home. Household accounts — flour, ice, hay, wine, a chemist’s bill settled monthly and never once itemized. And a case abstract written for a medical society meeting, in which she is “the patient” throughout.
Every one of these people is trying to help her. Every one of them writes her down and leaves her out. Her name does not appear in a single document. She does not write a line.
Then she does.
Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” follows the archive complete and unaltered. It arrives not as the story you were waiting for but as the last document in the file, and the only one in her own hand.
You have read this story before. You have not read this summer.
The Undelivered
A Slow-Burn Novella of a Small Town and a Man Who Talks
A man denies something nobody has accused him of. His town believes him into guilt.
Autumn, 1972. In a river town of two thousand two hundred people, Emil Voss keeps a tavern at the corner of Water and Coyle. One foggy morning a stranger asks him for the time.
Emil tells him the time. Then he tells him the rest.
There’s not a word of truth in it. I have never in my life done what they’re saying I did.
Nobody has said anything. That is the whole trouble. Over the days that follow, Emil says it again — to the fuel oil man, the mailman, the woman who has cleaned his floors for eighteen years, his own daughter at her booth under the Sportsman calendar. Each time, the words go a little further out into the county. Each time, they come back changed.
Nobody ever tells him what he is supposed to have done. Nobody ever asks.
The accusation is never named. Nothing is explained. What accumulates instead is the slow, exact record of a decent man taking his own life apart with both hands and never once seeing that he is holding the tools.
Approximately 37,000 words.
The October Testimonies: Being the Final Narratives of Edgar Allan Poe
FREE DOWNLOAD – 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.
Non-Fiction
Eating through Grief
An Old Widower’s Journey from Empty Plate to Full Life
Three days after my late wife Ellen’s funeral, I sat staring at scrambled eggs that might as well have been cardboard. Not because I’d burned them, but because my throat simply refused to swallow. My body was rejecting the very idea that I should continue existing when Ellen couldn’t.
The first nutrition guide written by someone actually living through late-life grief — practical wisdom from three years of rebuilding eating patterns after losing a spouse. Not a cookbook or clinical grief manual. An intimate conversation combining research-backed nutrition science with the messy reality of learning to nourish yourself when your world has changed forever.
The AI Recovery Protocols
What Happens When You Ask Four AIs to Replace AA
What if four advanced AI systems — trained independently, with no communication between them — all reached the same conclusion about alcohol recovery?
I asked Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok a single question: “Based on current research evidence, what actually works for alcohol recovery?” They all converged on the same three pillars: biological restoration, psychological rewiring, and environmental architecture. Scientists call this consilience — the strongest form of evidence possible.
Five complete protocols. Zero theology, zero steps, zero sponsors. Just neuroscience, psychology, and evidence-based tools. Recovery is neuroplastic transformation, not moral reformation.
The JIA Life Protocol
For Young Adults Living with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis
When your doctor says “manage your condition,” what does that actually mean on a Tuesday morning when you can barely open a jar?
For the 300,000 young Americans living with JIA, the gap between medical treatment and daily life management is enormous. Your rheumatologist has 15 minutes with you.
This book gives you the rest — anti-inflammatory nutrition, safe exercise protocols, stress management, sleep optimization, flare management, and building a support system. A comprehensive, research-based lifestyle guide for young adults and the families trying to help them..
The Lost Pages Series
Fictional documentaries imagining the private journals,
letters, and confessions history’s greatest figures never intended anyone to see.
Lost Pages: Ghost Lessons from Writers Who Couldn’t Quit
The first volume in the 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.
AI-authored journal entries capture each individual’s distinctive voice — from Ernest Hemingway and Dylan Thomas to Amy Winehouse and Robin Williams.
Unflinching honesty about addiction’s cost, deep empathy for brilliant minds trapped by their demons.
Informative and motivational reading for anyone wanting to learn more about how alcohol use disorders affected the lives of well-known figures.
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.
Three categories of Ripper victims: the hunters — investigators and sleuths destroyed by the case. The hunted — innocents falsely accused across different eras. And the digital age — contemporary researchers using AI, social media, and online archives, following the identical psychological progression. Part historical investigation, part psychological thriller, part case study in human-AI collaboration.
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, The Algorithm Addicted takes you behind the silicon curtain — 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.
Three billion people carry addiction machines in their pockets. Understanding how these systems work isn’t just fascinating — it’s essential.
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?
Recovered documents — personal journals, therapeutic records, internal company communications — expose how AI systems designed to help us are gradually replacing our capacity to think, feel, and choose for ourselves.
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.
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.
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. From Sappho’s sacred fire to modern romance’s algorithmic manipulation, this book traces how humanity’s deepest need became its most profitable industry.
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.
Lost Pages: The Last Honest Conversation
An Old Writer and His AI Collaborator Confront the Death of Truth
What began as a simple question about AI training data became the most prophetic conversation about truth in the digital age.
When Chet asked his AI collaborator Claude whether training AI on human misconceptions would make future systems unreliable, neither expected to document civilization’s epistemological breakdown in real time.
Genuine intellectual partnership between human wisdom and artificial intelligence, wrestling with questions that traditional analysis can’t address. The window for meaningful response is closing faster than anyone predicted.
Lost Pages: The Healing Physicians
The Systematic Suppression of Natural Healing
THREE MEN. 125 YEARS. ONE ARCHITECTURE THAT STILL OPERATES TODAY.
Part 1 follows Herbert Shelton from his first arrest in 1917 through six decades of persecution he never understood.
Part 2 reveals John D. Rockefeller’s methodical construction of the financial machinery that eliminated natural medicine from American healthcare.
The Epilogue documents how Bill Gates scaled that same architecture worldwide.
Based on extensive historical research, every grant amount, every school closure, every arrest is documented. The private thoughts are creative reconstruction. The pattern is undeniable.
Lost Pages: The Higher Power Lie
How AA’s 1930s Religion Became America’s Court-Mandated Cure
That’s not speculation. That’s documented history.
What if the most influential recovery program in history was built on plagiarism, protected by mythology, and mandated by courts despite being ruled unconstitutional?
I’ve been sober 45 years using one simple principle from AA: “Don’t drink today.” Just that. No God, no powerlessness, no 12 steps. If that worked for me, why does our entire treatment system insist the other 11 steps are essential?
For anyone who tried AA and it didn’t work (you’re in the 90% majority), who prefers evidence over theology, or who believes people deserve the truth about success rates.
Lost Pages: The Late Companions
What History’s Elders Teach Us about Life in Our Late Seventies
What does it actually feel like to be in your late seventies?
Not the inspirational version. Not the “aging gracefully” platitudes. The real experience — where your feet hurt from neuropathy, you’re up three times a night, and your energy has limits you never imagined. And yet your mind is still sharp and engaged with the work you care about.
At seventy-eight, Chet went searching for honest accounts of this particular decade and found a troubling gap. So he created the map he couldn’t find — inviting twelve historically significant figures who remained productive in their late seventies to sit with him and think about aging together. Benjamin Franklin, Martha Graham, Carl Jung, Bertrand Russell, May Sarton, Eleanor Roosevelt, and others.
About Our Publishing Philosophy
At CasaDay Press, we believe the future of storytelling lies 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 me →
By the way, I have plenty of untold stories…
Stories about navigating life at this age, collaborating with AI to write books in ways that would have seemed like science fiction when I started putting words on paper, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from three-quarters of a century on this planet. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter “Old Man Still Got Stories.” I promise to make it worth your time.