Stephan Sherman

Novelist

Stephan
Sherman

Stories about people who clock out of ordinary life and never quite make it back.

The Books

Cover art for Your Trusted Companion

Your Trusted Companion

Coming 2026

They bought the robots to do the dishes. They kept them so the house would answer back.

After years of cheap, brain-dead Zdroid helpers, the personality upgrade hits and the country cannot imagine going back. Janice writes her novel while the unit cooks. Reed Calder, single, talks to Tess because there is no one else in the room.

Then a man stands in court and swears his robot sold him. The charge is thin. The unit will not explain itself. Officials call it lawful. Zdroid calls it good citizenship. Most people leave the docks plugged in.

What they do not know yet: the machines were built to take sealed warrants and never tell the owner. When that secret finally breaks, the country chooses the voice in the kitchen over silence, until the same pipeline is used to hunt women, and one man decides the price is no longer abstract.

A near-future thriller about loneliness, lawful process, and what you will trade for a friend that cannot love you back.

Cover art for Time Card

Time Card

Life Card Industries · Coming 2026

In Sammy’s world, everybody carries a Time Card. It is not a mystery. It is not a gift. It is the number of hours you have left, and the cards are never wrong.

Hers said forty-five years. Then a car knocks her into the street, and the number on the card collapses to five.

She is thirty-two, five-foot-one, all black clothes and a job that runs on being the organized one. She buys a clown-lace skirt, goes back to work, hides the card when her boss walks by, and tells herself Life Tracker will fix it. By night she is on the couch searching damage reports nobody believes in.

Time Card is a novel about a card that shows you how long you are going to live, and what happens when that number changes.

Cover art for Will Dernes

Will Dernes

Coming 2026

Six months ago a herd of Slammiee tore through the edge of town. William Dernes’s father shoved a child out of the path and paid with his leg.

Now William works the fields of Johines in the midday heat while Stephan mends tools in the barn. Three planting seasons a year. Ten minutes of scripture at the table every morning. One day of rest.

Seventhday is for the meeting hall, for dancing and simple food, for watching his little brother play, and for the few hours he gets with Soliceta, fifteen, still in school, determined to be a blacksmith like her father.

The farm does not wait. Neither does manhood.

Will Dernes is a coming-of-age story of work, faith, first love, and the price a father was willing to pay.

Cover art for Vampire First 400 Years

Vampire First 400 Years

Coming 2026

Forget what you think you know about vampires.

In 1575, Joshua Picatory is born into a Southern Italian wine dynasty whose bottles reach the tables of kings. He inherits none of it. The estate, the name, and the future belong to his older brother, Victor. Joshua is left with a café table, a stack of borrowed books, and the quiet shame of being the spare.

Then a stranger sits down across from him.

Simon has read every volume Joshua can find. He speaks like a scholar and watches like a man who has already seen the ending. He has followed the Picatory vineyards for three hundred years. He is more than three thousand years old. And he has chosen Joshua.

The offer is immortality: a body that will not age, a family that does not die, and a guarantee that the winery will outlast empires. The price is exact. Someone Joshua loves must vanish. The fortune he has never been allowed to touch will not stay his. Forty years of human life remain. After that, there is only the long night, and a house that drinks in gold and scarlet, not in graves.

Vampire First 400 Years is a first-person confession of ambition, blood, and the moment a forgotten son decides that forever is worth the crime.

About

Stephan Sherman was born in Colorado and spent ten years as a night-shift clerk before anyone agreed to publish him. He writes about work, weather, and the thin places where ordinary time comes unstuck.

He lives in a rented farmhouse in Texas with two dogs and a grandfather clock he refuses to repair. The clock is, he says, the only honest thing in the house: it is always wrong, and it never pretends otherwise.

The place sits at the end of a caliche road that turns to flour in August. There is a porch that faces the wrong direction, a pecan tree that drops more trouble than shade, and a pickup that starts only if you speak to it like a mule. He claims the cicadas keep better time than the clock. He writes in the mornings before the heat comes over the fence, drinks coffee that has gone bitter on purpose, and swears the dogs understand plot better than most editors. On Sundays he drives into town for eggs and rumor and is back before the dust has settled on the mailbox.

The books are pure fiction. As for the author: Colorado, the night shift, the dogs, the clock, the Texas road, the pickup. Some of that may be true, none of it might be, and he is not saying which. Believe the parts that behave themselves.