Hide theBodyPRESS
Published under the name
Shit.
You startled me.
You really shouldn't sneak up on a woman in the dark like that.
But you found me.
Or maybe I left the trail where I knew you'd follow it.
Either way, here you are.
(this part is true)And here I am, caught in the unfortunate business of burying a Body.
Don't look so alarmed, darling.
It isn't quite what you think.
Hold the lantern a little higher, would you?
The woman in this grave is still very much alive.
She has a name. A life. Responsibilities. A respectable place in the daylight.
Which is precisely why she had to disappear.
Some truths survive better in darkness.
Some lies look prettier in the light.
And some stories can only be told after the woman writing them has stepped out of her name, stepped beyond the reach of expectation, and become someone else entirely.
So I buried her.
Not to kill her.
To set her free.
Careful where you step.
The dirt hasn’t settled yet.
And from that fresh-turned earth, N.E. Body crawled out.
A name that could belong to anybody.
A name that could belong to nobody.
A name she could disappear inside.
Go ahead.
Dig.
I know you want to.
There's evidence.
Of course there is.
A woman doesn't erase herself without leaving something behind.
Vestiges scattered through stories like footprints disappearing into fog.
Follow it long enough and you may begin to see her beneath me.
The woman in the grave.
The one whose name I borrowed pieces from, perhaps.
The one whose shadow fits mine a little too perfectly.
The one you'll swear you're one clue away from knowing.
Careful.
That's where this gets interesting.
Because sooner or later, you're going to want two things at once.
You'll want to dig her up.
And you'll want to help me keep her buried.
You'll understand that down here, beneath the name and the dirt and all this delicious plausible deniability, nothing has actually died.
Quite the opposite.
The things she cannot say in daylight come alive here.
The dark stories.
The indecent ones.
The dangerous ones.
The thoughts better whispered than explained.
Here, they don't have to behave.
Neither do I.
That is what anonymity buys us.
Not shame.
Freedom.
Freedom from a name.
Freedom from expectation.
Freedom from consequence beyond the edge of the page.
The body stays buried.
The woman walks back into the daylight untouched.
And I remain here in the shadows, writing everything she refuses to leave unsaid.
Now you understand why I can't let you dig too deep.
And why you're going to anyway.
Get as close to the truth as you dare.
I might even leave the porch light on for you.
But if you finally put the pieces together, if one night the fog lifts and suddenly you know exactly whose shadow you've been following...
No, you don't.
You never saw her.
You never heard her name.
You found N.E. Body.
And N.E. Body could be anybody.
Now...
hold the lantern steady.
Take a good look.
Your fingerprints are already on the evidence.
And since you've come this far,
grab the shovel.
Help me Hide the Body.
N.E. Body
Everyone assumes a mask is meant to hide the person beneath it.
I've always thought that was a rather unimaginative way of looking at masks.
Sometimes the mask is the only face honest enough to tell the truth.
So before we go any further, you should understand something about me.
N.E. Body is a name that hides as much as it reveals.
Perhaps more than it should.
It could belong to anybody, which makes it a particularly useful name for somebody who prefers to remain nobody.
There is, of course, a woman beneath it.
She has another name. Another life. Responsibilities. A reputation. A perfectly respectable relationship with daylight.
She belongs to the world outside these pages.
I belong here.
In the shadows.
In the uncomfortable thought that arrives after midnight and refuses to leave.
In desire without apology. Fear without reassurance. Women who behave badly. Men who behave worse. Beautiful things with something rotten underneath. Love brushing against death. Truth dressed convincingly enough to pass for fiction.
After all, the mind can be a dark place.
Names are heavier than they look.
They arrive dragging expectations behind them. They remind you who you're supposed to be, what you're allowed to say, which doors a respectable woman ought to leave unopened.
A mask travels lighter.
I can follow a story wherever it wants to go. Into the bedroom. Into the graveyard. Through the locked door. Across the line someone else drew and told me not to cross.
I can write desire without blushing and darkness without apologizing for turning out the light.
I can be obscene.
Tender.
Cruel.
Strange.
Unladylike.
Honest.
And when the last word is written, She can wash the dirt from her hands, step back into the daylight, and leave me here with the evidence.
That's the freedom of an alias.
Or perhaps the freedom of a mask.
Everyone assumes she puts me on when she writes.
I've never said which of us is wearing the disguise.
Look at the photograph again.
Am I putting the mask on?
Or taking it off?
Exactly.
If you're hoping I'll clear that up for you, you're going to be disappointed.
I chose this nom de plume carefully.
A name ordinary enough to disappear into a crowd and peculiar enough to make the curious look twice.
And if you do look twice, you may notice something else.
The name is hiding in plane sight.
It reveals more than it hides.
I won't tell you how.
Where would be the fun in that?
I will tell you this: if E were my middle initial, it would stand for Erotica.
The rest you'll have to investigate yourself.
I've left a papertrail.
A sentence serving life on the page.
A turn of phrase that gives it to you straight.
A Freudian slip of the pen.
A word disguised as another.
A detail I probably should have changed.
An initial.
A place.
A memory wearing fiction's clothes.
A fingerprint pressed into the prose before I remembered to wipe it clean.
Some of the clues are accidents.
Some are invitations.
I'll never tell you which.
Follow the footprints.
Mine seem to be wearing stilettos.
Eventually, you may feel that peculiar little flicker of recognition:
I know this woman.
Maybe you do.
Maybe you're supposed to.
That's the lovely contradiction of anonymity.
From the shadows, I can tell you things I could never say in the light.
So, the less you know about the woman who writes these stories, the more honestly you may come to know her.
And perhaps, eventually, you'll get very close.
Close enough to recognize the silhouette.
Close enough to solve the whole damned thing.
Follow the clues. Collect your evidence. Make your theories. Compare notes in dark corners. Become absolutely insufferable about that one clue you're certain everyone else missed.
I expect nothing less.
And should you ever discover exactly which face is the mask, I trust you'll know what to do.
Revel in the pleasure of knowing our little secret.
And the exquisite burden of keeping it.
Evidence recovered in three parts
Les Petites Morts
Three love affairs. Three little deaths. Desire, mortality, and the dangerous things we mistake for lovers. Nothing here is quite what it seems.
Forthcoming
Les Petites Morts · I
Forthcoming
A troubled New Orleans dominatrix with dangerous appetites and a growing body count has spent her life aching for the mysterious lover who always whispers “not yet”... until the night he finally says yes.
Les Petites Morts · II
Forthcoming
A woman blessed with beauty, family, fame, and everything she ever wanted falls for the man who gave it all to her, only to discover how coldly he takes back anything she loves more than him.
Les Petites Morts · III
Forthcoming
Two lovers who have spent an eternity on opposite sides of every beginning and ending are being drawn toward the one thing neither has ever stopped wanting: each other.
Pending
The file is not closed. Other titles — standalones, shorter pieces, things she hasn't confessed to yet — are already gathering in the shadows. Watch this space. The inventory grows.
How to acquire
Each title will be available in ebook and paperback through Kindle Direct and the usual retailers the moment it publishes — purchase links will appear on each cover above. Signed copies and early proofs are circulated privately to accomplices only. For rights, review copies, or discreet enquiries, write to alibi@hidethebody.press.
Every good story needs a little plausible deniability.
Hide the Body Press was built on it.
We publish the stories that tend to appear after respectable company has gone home. Stories with dirt beneath their fingernails. Stories about desire and death, darkness and resurrection, beautiful lies and inconvenient truths. Stories that wander beyond the boundaries of good taste, good behavior, and occasionally good judgment.
The kind of stories that need somewhere safe to exist.
So we made one.
Hide the Body Press is an independent publishing house devoted to creative freedom without apology. Here, writers are allowed to follow a story wherever it leads, without asking whether the person they are expected to be in daylight would dare follow.
Because identity can be a strange kind of censorship.
A name carries history.
Expectation.
Responsibility.
Reputation.
It enters the room before the writer does and occasionally has the audacity to reach for the pen.
We prefer to shed it somewhere on the writing-room floor.
Or, when necessary, bury it.
That is the peculiar philosophy behind Hide the Body Press.
We don't hide the art.
We hide whatever keeps the artist from making it.
Sometimes that means publishing beneath another name.
Sometimes it means exploring the shadow self.
Sometimes it means writing the indecent thought, the frightening thought, the impossible thought, the thought you've spent years pretending you never had.
And sometimes it simply means allowing fiction to be fiction without putting its author on trial for imagining it.
Around here, anonymity isn't shame.
It's artistic freedom.
Our first known, or rather unknown suspect writes under the name N.E. Body, an alias that could belong to anybody and appears to have been chosen with suspicious care.
We have been advised not to speculate further.
Unofficially, Hide the Body Press has no idea who she is.
Officially, that's none of your business.
Whatever resemblance readers discover between fiction and reality, author and alias, confession and invention is entirely coincidental.
That's our story, anyway.
And we're sticking to it.
What we can confirm is this:
The work is real.
The woman behind it is real.
The freedom the darkness gives her is real.
Everything else is protected.
That's what an alibi is for.
So read the books.
Follow the leads.
Make your theories.
Just remember that curiosity and discretion can coexist rather beautifully.
Because if you eventually discover exactly what we've been hiding here, we trust you'll understand something the rest of the world may not:
Some things are buried because they're dead.
Others are buried so something else can live.
Welcome to Hide the Body Press.
Flee the scene.
Practice your alibi.
And if anybody asks, we were never here.
For rights, press, business inquiries, review copies, or other matters that require getting our stories straight:
For legal purposes, this conversation never happened.
Restricted circulation
If anybody asks, you were with me all night.
You've seen enough to know better than to leave without an alibi.
Leave your email. I'll send you new evidence, recovered pages, release notices, and the occasional clue I probably should have destroyed.
What you do with them is your business.
What you tell anyone else is ours.
Your information stays between us.
Evidence recovered
I really should be more careful about what I leave behind.
Stories leave evidence.
So do writers.
Pages that didn't make the final cut. Notes scribbled in margins. Research that led somewhere it shouldn't have. Photographs without explanations. Confessions disguised as fiction. The occasional detail I probably ought to have changed.
I've collected some of it here.
Some of it will tell you more about the books.
Some of it may tell you more about me.
Knowing the difference is your problem.
Case note
August 7, 2026
There are easier names for a publishing house. Safer ones, certainly. But I was never interested in making the stories safer.
Follow the trail →Loose end
August 5, 2026
We're given one before anyone knows enough about us to choose correctly, and then spend the rest of our lives answering to it.
Follow the trail →Case note
August 2, 2026
Everyone assumes a mask exists to conceal the face beneath it. I've always thought that was a rather unimaginative way of looking at masks.
Follow the trail →Loose end
July 29, 2026
You've probably already seen something you weren't supposed to. Don't get excited.
Follow the trail →Recovered page
July 24, 2026
You checked. I like that about you.
Follow the trail →