Caspian Ventura Out now Buy on Amazon
Cover of Severed Blood by Caspian Ventura: a woman's face split down the centre by gold seams, the Singapore skyline behind her.

Book One of a trilogy

Out now · Grimdark supernatural thriller

She hunts monsters.She is one.

Something is draining the poor and the vanished to keep the wealthy forever young. Marisol Salazar knows the trade from the inside. She was born into it.

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Setting — Singapore & Manila
Length — approx. 60,000 words
Folklore — Filipino aswang, forensically rebuilt

Content note: graphic violence and body horror. A dark read.

The Book Severed Blood

She hunts the monsters harvesting her city. She is one of them.

By day, Marisol Salazar is the finest medical laboratory scientist in Singapore — steady hands, colder eyes, the woman who can read a blood smear like a confession. By night, she comes apart along a seam no surgeon ever made, and she hunts.

Something is draining the poor and the vanished to keep the wealthy forever young. Marisol knows the trade from the inside — she was born into it, clawed her way out, and now turns its own reagents against it, one silver-nitrate cut at a time. But every cut brings her closer to the ancient matriarch at the top of the empire… and to the truth about whose bones built it.

Then Julian — the human surgeon she never meant to love — finds the seam running down her chest. And a syndicate of hunters decides the most dangerous specimen in the city is the one wearing the lab coat.

To save a stolen child, Marisol will have to become the very thing she has spent her whole life proving she is not.

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There are two ways to stop a thing from hurting you when it leaves. You can love it less. Or you can never let it become whole enough to go.

Read the Opening Prologue

See the dark before you buy it.

A woman slips into Manila Bay at midnight, and something ancient rises to meet her.

Prologue — Manila Bay

The Siren's Grace was the kind of yacht that made harbormasters straighten their uniforms. Seventy feet of white fiberglass and teak, a master suite that cost more than most Manila families earned in a decade. Albert Cruz had named her after a woman he'd destroyed. Marisol had always thought it was the most honest thing about him.

Every night near midnight she slipped off the stern into the bay.

It was the one ritual Albert tolerated and never understood. Not swimming, not exercise — just the warm black water closing over her, her body going slack, her eyes finding what stars the smog allowed. Down here, nothing asked her to account for herself. The bay took her weight and wanted no explanation for it. It was the closest thing to prayer she had.

She heard it before she saw it.

A long, resonant exhale — something vast letting go of its breath — and the water beside the hull heaved slowly open. The whale rose the way old things move, without hurry, certain of its welcome.

The rest is in the book.

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Evidence Four specimens

What she leaves behind.

A tarnished silver triquetra pendant resting on dark green silk, beaded with water.
TriquetraThe pendant she never removes
A single labelled blood collection tube standing alone in an otherwise empty steel rack.
Sample #07Unmarked — the one she can't run
An open laboratory centrifuge loaded with blood tubes, rain on the window behind it.
Centrifuge2 a.m. in the pathology lab
Scattered orange marigold petals, a guttering candle, and a stick of incense still smoking.
OfferingMarigolds, half-burned

The Author Caspian Ventura

Day job
Practicing Clinical Laboratory Scientist
Specialty
Blood, marrow, and tissue — reading what a body confesses after a person can no longer speak
Writes
Surgical body horror drawn from the world's oldest folklore

The lab is not research. It's the day job.

Caspian Ventura is the pen name of a practicing Clinical Laboratory Scientist. The blood, the reagents, the marrow, the way a body comes apart on a table — none of it is invented.

Most horror writers research a lab for a week. He has spent a career inside one, reading human tissue for the truth. That work teaches you where the body keeps its secrets and how quietly it gives them up. It runs beneath every page of Severed Blood — in the reagent that works because it really works, in the smear that reads like a confession because that is what a smear does.

Now he uses it to build monsters.

Severed Blood is the first of three. Each book to come opens into a different mythology, a different corner of the world where something older has always been waiting.

Book Two In progress