Valley Versus Vector

Valley Versus Vector is a psychoanalytic folk horror novel that plunges into the depths of abjection, trauma, and bodily transgression. When Ellis Horning, a nurse at Christ Hospital in Oregon, experiences a necrophilic rupture with a deceased patient, his psyche fractures-opening a conduit to a sentient bacterial intelligence known as the Christ Contagion. Haunted by childhood guilt and drawn into a hallucinatory communion with the river's divine ecology, Ellis becomes the site of a metaphysical infection that reconfigures identity, desire, and the limits of the human. Building on Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection within a folk horror and ecological mystical setting, Valley Versus Vector is a descent into the horror of becoming set within the landscapes of Corvallis, Oregon, and Greenville, South Carolina.

Jahan Brian Ihsan is a writer and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of personal memory, cultural inheritance, and historical trauma. Raised in the American South, he developed an early sensitivity to the way history lingers beneath the surface of everyday life-the ghosts of the antebellum era haunting columned porches from Greenville, South Carolina to the cemeteries of Savannah, Georgia. In the charismatic churches of the Appalachians, where ecstatic snake handling still occurs, he witnessed how belief can blur into spectacle, and how the sacred often carries a shadow.Now based in the Pacific Northwest, Ihsan channels these layered geographies into works that walk the line between personal narrative and cultural haunting. Jahan has an MA in Comparative Religion from Claremont School of Theology and a BA in English Literature and Writing from Marylhurst University.