Speculative fiction for young people
The strange
places we
call home.
Fiction by Jonathan Riley.
Where memory, belonging, and the familiar
begin to unravel.
The novel
The
Gatekeepers
A YA speculative thriller
Rooted in Black Southern Gothic
Minutes for her.
A month for everyone else.
Lake Monroe, 1996. Sixteen-year-old Mara Kline drives home after dropping off her friends and finds a memorial cross in her yard. Her mother collapses. A stranger claims to be her stepfather. The father she left alive has been dead for five years.
Her drive took less than an hour. Lake Monroe says she vanished thirty-one days ago.
With her older brother, Isaac, Mara begins investigating the missing month. But the deeper they dig, the less the town’s explanations fit—and the more dangerous it becomes to insist that the life she remembers was real.
The people she loves insist this is her life. What if they’re wrong?
About the author
Jonathan
Riley
Jonathan Riley is a Black writer and finance lawyer based in Dallas, Texas, where he lives with his wife and three children. He writes speculative fiction for young people—especially Black and neurodivergent readers—because they deserve to see themselves at the center of ambitious, propulsive stories that take their families, histories, and interior lives seriously.
As a writer with ADHD, he is drawn to layered mysteries, pattern recognition, and characters who question the explanations imposed on them. His work explores family, identity, memory, and the systems that shape—and sometimes distort—all three.
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