My Husband is a Kaiju

When Alan Ringard touches the meteor fragment on his lawn, he expects nothing more than a curious story to tell at work on Monday. What he gets instead is a passenger. HOTM—Heart of the Meteor—is an ancient intelligence that claims Alan's body as its new home, settling into the most unlikely of thrones. From this intimate stronghold, HOTM begins to learn what makes humanity tick: our hunger for respect, our dreams of becoming something more than what we are. And in Alan's modest, working-class life, all those dreams point toward one destination: the engineer's cab of a commuter train. What starts as an odd voice in Alan's head—annoying, intrusive, like a radio station he can't quite tune out—gradually becomes something darker. HOTM doesn't just observe; it participates. It controls. Alan finds himself a passenger in his own life, watching helplessly as this alien intelligence uses his hands, his voice, his marriage, his ambitions for purposes he never intended. But something unexpected is happening to Alan's children. Changed by HOTM's presence in ways no one quite understands, they're developing their own plan—one that involves letting the parasite think it's winning, letting it grow beyond the confines of its original host. When Alan's transformation reaches its catastrophic conclusion—when the man becomes something vast and terrible—the story shifts from intimate horror to cosmic spectacle. Enter Brad the Space Unicorn, Earth's unlikely celebrity defender, arriving to save the day. But HOTM has been patient. It's been waiting for exactly this moment, for exactly this kind of hero. A strange and unsettling tale about the things we lose when we chase validation, the alien forces that exploit our weaknesses, and the terrible bargains we make in the name of becoming someone who matters.