Welcoming Sayan J. Soselisa

Flame Tree Press welcomes an exciting new talent, science writer Sayan J. Soselisa, to the blog to talk about their short story “The Dissolution of Self on the Altar of Your Dreams: A Case Study”, which appears alongside a stellar line-up in the groundbreaking anthology This Way Lies Madness, releasing in September from Flame Tree Press in our Beyond & Within series. In the introduction to the work, the book’s co-editors, Dave Jeffery and Lee Murray, say the anthology “defies convention by bringing together authentic, sensitive portrayals of mental illness in a genre that has notoriously lacked such tenets.” Comprising 23 stories and poems, the book also includes accompanying vignettes offering insight into the authors’ motivation for their work.

Today, Sayan J. Soselisa shares an excerpt from their story along with a short glimpse into their inspiration.

Excerpt:

You let the fly recover from surgery as you boot your stimulus in the imaging room. It needs to be ready to fly when you place it in the virtual reality chamber below the microscope. The cylindrical screen will immerse your fly in a new world, ready to explore. You will show it predators, looming left and right, and measure the responses in its brain. Predict its turns as it tries to escape. The screen flickers on as your fly starts to shake off the sluggishness of the cold. You align the fly’s brain with the laser scanning of the microscope. You shut down all the other lights in the imaging room and close the curtains around your setup. Then you press ‘start’ to let the stimulus play as you set the microscope to record the cresting of brain activity inside the fly’s head.

Soselisa writes:

“This piece was me processing a time in my life when I felt I had one singular purpose at which I could either fail or succeed, and I did not consider failure an option. It started when I was in a position not unlike that of the scientist in this story. Fortunately, I could take action to find a way out of that doomed scenario, but the scientist in the story did not. It’s a reflection on being so driven by a goal that it consumes all else – to the point that you even forget why you had that goal in the first place, and you lose sight of yourself.”

As well as Soselisa’s story, Murray and Jeffery invite readers of This Way Lies Madness to discover “tales of trauma, dissociation, body dysmorphia, psychosis, depression, anxiety, and more, captured in all forms of horror from the extreme to the nuanced. There is jaw-dropping violence, skin-crawling body horror, and quirky dark humour, alongside the quiet, heartbreaking introspections of people spiralling into madness. Yet all the stories and poems in this volume are framed so that the insensitive, stereotypical presentations of mental illness commonly found in horror are resoundingly and appropriately absent.”

"A mesmerizing and remarkably ambitious mosaic of delicate minds possessed, of spoiled and haunted hearts, of gaping wounds both seen and unseen. This Way Lies Madness weaves a beguiling and profoundly revealing tapestry of psychological terror with such nuance and depth in each collected story." – Eric LaRocca, author of Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke

Sayan J. Soselisa is a neurobiologist and professional troubleshooter whose stories tend to be either funny, tragic or both. They enjoy exploring odd places and perspectives in their fiction, and try to shed a new light on the things we believe to be familiar. Sayan tends to root for the underdog, the (sometimes) unjustly vilified; the outcasts, outsiders and everything and everyone that doesn’t neatly fit into a box. They have a fascination for the darker side of existence, and a strong will to find joy in there nevertheless. When not writing or solving problems at their day job, they are probably preoccupied with one of their many, many hobbies, or can be found in one of Vienna’s many coffee houses.

This Way Lies Madness is out September 9th 2025: Pre-Order Now