The Closet of Doom · middle grade · in progress
Every middle school has one. Nobody remembers who went in.
Fourth period, spring equinox. The room shakes, the lights flicker, and when they come back on there are two seventh graders standing where there were three a minute ago — and neither of them can say who the third one was. That is how a Closet of Doom works. It takes a kid, and it takes the memory of the kid along with it.
Draft in progress · no release date · nothing to pre-order
What it is
A survival guide to the part of middle school nobody warns you about.
It is not a novel pretending to be a handbook. It is a handbook that keeps getting interrupted by a story.
Middle School. The great furnace of American society. Where children enter and adults emerge — assuming they survive.
From the forewordEvery chapter opens with the guide talking: survival statistics, the odds a closet reveals itself on an equinox or a full moon, the three facts researchers agree on, one 1893 incident involving a comically large toilet full of molasses. Then the guide stops and the actual kids take over.
Jenna Chapman and Chloe Petersen are seventh graders at Ferris Middle School in Bueller, South Carolina, and the sort of friends where if one goes down they both go down. Their English teacher, Mr. Thorton, has been threatening the class with the closet in the back corner of his room all year, which is exactly why nobody takes it seriously. He knows precisely what it is. He got out of one himself when he was their age, and that is the reason he cannot go back in after anyone.
So the girls go. Down a hatch, down a ladder that retracts into the ceiling behind them, into a torchlit dungeon with a food supply, a tally of days scratched into the wall, a room full of armored roaches the length of your foot, and a boy who has been down there a great deal longer than the two minutes that have passed upstairs.
Middle grade. Funny first and frightening second, and built so that a kid who does not like reading keeps turning pages to find out what is on the next level down.
Where it came from
I told them the closet was dangerous. That was the mistake.
There is a decommissioned bathroom in the back corner of my classroom. Early in the year I told my students it was the Closet of Doom. Instead of shying away from it, they got excited and almost immediately opened the door.
So I escalated. Finish the assignment or you get thrown in the Closet of Doom. My threats had a less than desirable outcome. They started raising their hands to be next in line. I told them about the secret door inside it, and the dungeon past that, and the giant cockroaches on level one. That bought me roughly three seconds. Now I have a standing queue of teenagers asking for a chance to go in and look for the hidden entrance.
I wrote about it on the blog in August 2025, mostly as a request for help. Nobody had any. The book is what happened instead.
How it gets written
My own classes hear it first, out loud, a chapter at a time.
I read the chapters to my seventh and eighth graders as I finish them. Not as a treat at the end of the week — as the edit. Thirteen-year-olds are ruthless and completely honest about exactly one thing: whether they are bored. You can hear a boring paragraph happening. Chairs move, somebody checks the clock, and I mark the page.
Then I cut that part. A book for middle schoolers that has been read aloud to a room full of them before it goes anywhere near a copy editor is a different book than one that has not.
Which is also the only honest reason to sign up eighteen months early. You are not waiting on a release date I already know. You are getting told the day there is one.
One ask
There is no date yet, and I would rather tell you the truth than a guess.
The draft is not finished. There is no release day, no pre-order and no price, and anybody who hands you one of those right now is making it up. Leave an email address and you will hear from me on the day that changes.
Find out when The Closet of Doom is real.
One email when it is finished. Field notes in between, if you want them. Nothing else.
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