The easy answer: no, each book is its own, unique, standalone tale. The cooler answer: in a sense, yes, every book is connected to every other.

Silhouette is the common thread that links them all together—the universe itself and the rather unusual town that sits at what may be the exact center of it. The characters you’ll read about still have plenty of adventures left once you reach the last page of the book, even though the story itself draws to a close. You’ll be seeing many of them in other (sometimes surprising) places, with other characters scattered throughout the Silhouette Universe. Characters seen, heard, and even merely alluded to in the novels already published exist in the fuller fabric of this fictional universe, and have their own histories and adventures waiting to be revealed.

Ah, categorization! Let’s face facts: an entire universe, particularly one as strange as the Silhouette Universe, is a bit too big to fit into the fickle clutches of human-made categories. If you want to force it, these books get along well with others on the overly broad “Science Fiction and Fantasy” shelves in a standard brick-and-mortar store.

As with a lot of Geoph Essex’s work, the Silhouette novels can be more aptly classified as “mythic realism” or even “urban fantasy”: real-world sorts of settings with magic and myth sewn in and revealing themselves to the characters as they go.

All of that largely ignores, of course, what the books may or may not actually be about, and what types of readers might actually like to read them. There’s comedy, there’s action, there’s adventure, there’s romance. There are some tear-jerking moments and some outright silly bits. In short: it’s life, with a little extra. How do you categorize that? (If marketing has their way: with a cattle prod.)

First and foremost: the kind of reader who knows both the rule about ending sentences with prepositions and why that rule is bunk in the English language.

More helpfully, if you enjoy the word-juggling works of Douglas Adams and the higher-brow of the high-brow stand-up comics, you’ll dig these. If you like the way Christopher Moore and Tom Robbins weave together silly bits and clever adventures in the same tale, you’ll like the way these stories move. And if you’re a fan of the incredible and inventive mythological worlds that writers like Tim Powers and Neil Gaiman construct, you’ll enjoy each glimpse of the multiverse-spanning mythology that serves as a backdrop to the Silhouette stories.

We’ve got strange, we’ve got bizarre, we’ve got absurd. You’ll laugh, cheer, and maybe even cry a little. In short, the Silhouette books are fast, furious, funny, and they corner on a dime. If all that sounds like your cup of tea, bring a Thermos.

Aside from writing, Geoph Essex is also an accomplished illustrator, animator, and 3D artist, and a freelance professional graphic designer. He conceives and creates the covers for all of the Silhouette novels himself. (And, of course, designed and developed this website!)

They’re not hiding! All published Silhouette books are available on Amazon.com in print and Kindle formats.

That would be telling.