Michael Clayton

“It's better to write shit than to shovel it.”

HorrorBakersfield, CAST. BRIELLE CITY MAP Substack Instagram

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Writer’s Statement

About Michael Clayton

I'm a novelist, screenwriter, and creative director whose work blends literary horror, psychological suspense, and supernatural mystery. Fascinated by the intersection of faith, memory, and mythology, I creates stories that explore the unseen systems shaping ordinary lives, often through richly atmospheric settings and deeply human characters. Bullets With Names is my debut novel and the first installment in the expanding mythology of St. Brielle, an interconnected fictional universe spanning novels, films, and immersive digital experiences.

Currently working on"Glassmouth" an unofficial sequel to my novel, "Bullets With Names."

Work with me

Tell me like it is.

The Work Shelf

Selected visual work

Images, editions, and process films shared by Michael Clayton.

2 projects2 visual assets2 collections

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Collection

Selected Work

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Working on + finished

Finished · Novella

AVA / EVE

Ava is an ordinary young woman working behind the counter at Mire Records, trying to make rent, keep her head down, and move through St. Brielle without becoming anybody’s story. Then VoxSkin Studios discovers what it calls her “perfect” face—an image so visually stable their technology can reproduce it almost without correction—and recruits her for a new campaign. Almost overnight, Ava goes from record-store clerk to citywide obsession: her face fills screens, strangers recognize her, and admiration curdles into something disturbingly close to worship. But when that attention becomes entitlement and Ava is assaulted, she stops being willing to play the beautiful, passive object everyone expects. Her search for revenge draws her deeper into St. Brielle’s hidden machinery, where mirrors remember, cameras behave like witnesses, worship has consequences, and a voice calling itself Eve begins teaching Ava that there may be something much older—and much more dangerous—living inside the world’s need to look at her.

2026

Finished · Novel

Bullets With Names

In the city of St. Brielle, Massachusetts, names carry weight—sometimes enough to kill. When veteran detective Nathaniel Harper responds to a chilling 911 call reporting gunfire and chanting in a decaying farmhouse, he expects meth heads or a survivalist cult. Instead, his team finds a man waiting calmly at a kitchen table beside an oak box filled with bullets—each one engraved with a name. Including his own. What begins as a routine raid spirals into a metaphysical mystery as Harper uncovers the terrifying nature of the bullets: they are not weapons, but records. Seeds. Prayers turned sideways. Each one bears a name marked for death by something older and darker than justice—a faceless entity whispered of in forgotten convents and carved into the bones of the city itself. As the box exerts its quiet influence over the precinct, more names begin to appear—including that of Harper’s daughter. With time unraveling and reality bending around him, Harper must confront the question no detective is prepared to answer: Can a name be saved once it’s been called? Bullets With Names is a genre-bending supernatural thriller—a blend of police procedural, cosmic horror, and psychological suspen

Published Pieces

Work by Michael Clayton

Quiet Hours

The University of St. Brielle Library closed at midnight, but the building didn’t sleep. Iris learned this on her third overnight shift, seated at the circulation desk with a cup of vending-machine coffee that tasted fai…

Fiction · 977 words · Aug 26, 2026

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