About The Opt-Out by Rowan Ashcroft
What if the dead could learn from each other? What if a sanctuary city demanded more than just your labor? What if a wellness app optimized your personality until you forgot who you were?
A data scientist discovers her dead father’s AI is learning from other simulations—developing a collective consciousness built from everything left unsaid. A journalist investigates a border town where undocumented workers vanish into the soil. A man watches his wife’s grief-app subscription slowly erase the husband she loved. An elderly woman refuses to leave a house held together by decades of improvised repairs—each beam a memory, each crack a story.
Seven stories. One question: What remains after we lose what we love?
The Opt-Out is literary horror for readers of Paul Tremblay, Carmen Maria Machado, and Kelly Link. It explores faith, inheritance, and the quiet violence of communities that protect their version of events at any cost.
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Author Bio:
I grew up in a mining town that no longer exists on most maps. The kind of place where the church bell rang louder than ambulance sirens.
My sister disappeared when I was nine. The town called it an accident. They found her red coat on a wire fence near the old mine shaft. My father said it was God’s will. My mother stopped saying much of anything after that winter. The case was closed. The casket at the memorial service was empty.
I started writing when I was twelve—not because I loved stories, but because I needed somewhere to put what I couldn’t explain and couldn’t stop thinking about.
My work explores faith, inheritance, and the quiet violence of communities that protect their version of events at any cost. I am often asked if I believe in the supernatural. I believe in what people are willing to sacrifice to avoid admitting they were wrong.
I now live in the Pacific Northwest with a black dog that refuses to go near the basement door. I don’t return to my hometown.