Rubicons: A Freaks Novel

Finding themselves. Fighting together. Growing apart.

Junior year has arrived in Quapaw City, Arkansas, and the Freaks are facing an enemy even their extraordinary powers can't defeat: growing up.

With college, careers, and uncertain futures looming, the young superheroes are beginning to question what comes next—and whether their lives are still headed in the same direction. But there's little time to contemplate adulthood when danger is closing in from every side.

The Team, a shadowy government agency determined to protect the world from supernatural threats, has become an increasingly dangerous adversary. And now a terrifying creature of scales and wings threatens to destroy every life in Quapaw City—with devastation far beyond the town potentially at stake.

As the Freaks confront their most formidable challenges yet, the bonds that once united them begin to fracture. Their powers may be extraordinary, but friendship, loyalty, and trust are proving much harder to maintain. Can they stand together against a common enemy when they can no longer agree on what they're fighting for?

And what happens when they discover that, in someone else's story, they might be the villains?

Brett Riley is the author of Comanche, a Western horror novel; Lord of Order; and the Freaks series, comprising Freaks, Travelers, and Rubicons, in that order. His fiction spans Western horror, speculative fiction, and supernatural thrillers, often featuring extraordinary characters confronting dangerous and unpredictable worlds.

A professor of English at the College of Southern Nevada, Riley grew up in southeastern Arkansas and earned his Ph.D. in contemporary American fiction and film from Louisiana State University. His short fiction has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Folio, The Wisconsin Review, and The Baltimore Review.

Riley lives in Henderson, Nevada, where he continues to write and teach.