Category: gaslighting

A Frequency of Secrets: A Phone Anxiety Thriller

Finishing A Frequency of Secrets Earlier Than Expected

I finished A Frequency of Secrets earlier than I expected. The words came quickly, but not because the story was easy to write. They came quickly because the subject lives so close to me mentally. The fears, the spiraling thoughts, the imagined conversations, and the constant anticipation of what might happen next were already familiar territory and kept me up nights.

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the mind of someone with phone anxiety—the chaos, confusion, and constant what-ifs? For someone who suffers from phone anxiety, a ringing phone is rarely just a ringing phone. It can become a warning, a confrontation, a piece of bad news, or the beginning of a situation that hasn’t even happened. Elaborate thoughts arise before the call is answered. Connections are made between events that may have nothing to do with one another. A delayed response can feel like rejection. An unknown number can become a threat. A brief silence on the other end can open the door to dozens of worst-case scenarios.

Phone anxiety can also be intensely physical. It can bring panic, sweating, heart palpitations, nausea, tension, and the overwhelming urge to avoid the call altogether. Yet the mental symptoms can be just as consuming. The mind inflates ordinary circumstances into disasters. It rehearses every possible outcome, searches for hidden meanings, and prepares for problems that may never exist. A Frequency of Secrets was written by someone who understands that experience.

The novel reveals what can happen inside a phone-anxiety-stricken mind, where fear alters perception and creates connections that otherwise might not exist. In the story, voices, calls, secrets, and imagined possibilities begin to overlap. The telephone becomes more than an object. It becomes a source of dread, suspicion, memory, and uncertainty. It’s an emotional closeness so much so that I didn’t have to search very far for the feelings behind the story. The anxiety was already there. The physical sensations were familiar. The habit of turning a small uncertainty into a much larger possibility was familiar. Once I entered that mindset on the page, the words flowed freely and consistently.

A Frequency of Secrets is part of my new series, A Phone Anxiety Thriller. This series is especially close to me because its psychological foundation comes from an experience I know intimately. The connections to phone anxiety seem to run through my veins. Every unanswered call, imagined emergency, misunderstood silence, and intrusive possibility offers another pathway into suspense.

These novels are not simply about telephones. They’re about anticipation, what the mind creates while waiting for someone to answer, the stories we invent when we don’t have enough information, and how quickly those stories can begin to feel real. Below is the cover (from the Ukrainian graphic designers at GetCovers) of the next in the series, because having the cover prompts mental engagement and the need to get words onto paper.

Writing this series allows me to take something that has caused genuine discomfort in my own life and transform it into fiction. On the page, anxiety becomes atmosphere. Avoidance becomes tension. Racing thoughts become clues, suspicions, and dangerous possibilities.

Finishing A Frequency of Secrets quickly made sense. I was writing from a place that was already deeply known to me. I understood the fear before I understood the plot. I recognized the emotional rhythms before I wrote the scenes. Once locked into that world, I stayed awake nights trying to get the characters’ anticipation out of my system because of the emotional intensity. This series may be fictional, but the anxiety beneath it is real to me.

Now Available: Where Voices Go to Hide

 

A Haunting New Phone-Anxiety Thriller by Angela Grey


What happens when every telephone call reveals more than the person on the other end intends to say? Where Voices Go to Hide, the first novel in Angela Grey’s new Phone Anxiety Thriller series, is now available.

Elena Sterling has always dreaded answering the phone. The ringing triggers an immediate surge of fear—the racing heart, tightened chest, shallow breathing, and overwhelming urge to let the call go unanswered. But Elena’s fear is not simply ordinary phone anxiety. When she finally answers, she hears two voices. One belongs to the person speaking. The other reveals what they are trying desperately to conceal. Buried beneath polite greetings and carefully chosen words, Elena hears fragments of terror, guilt, resentment, and violence. She hears thoughts that were never meant to leave the safety of another person’s mind.

Then an unknown woman calls Elena’s fiancé. The woman’s voice sounds controlled, but beneath it Elena hears panic. She also hears a thought belonging to her fiancé, Theo Lockhart: Not again. Those two words open the door to a pattern of missing women, carefully protected secrets, and a past Theo refuses to explain. As Elena begins questioning everything she believed about the man she loves, the telephone becomes both her greatest source of evidence and the instrument of her deepest fear. Every call brings her closer to the truth. Every voice gives her another reason not to trust anyone. And someone already knows what Elena can hear.

A Thriller Born from a Real Fear 

Where Voices Go to Hide was inspired in part by my own experience with phone anxiety, sometimes called telephobia. For people who experience it, an incoming call can cause genuine emotional and physical distress. The sound of a ringing telephone may trigger dread, racing thoughts, nausea, trembling, difficulty breathing, or an intense fear of saying the wrong thing. Even listening to a voicemail or returning a routine call can feel overwhelming.

I wanted to explore what might happen if someone already terrified of telephone conversations suddenly had an even greater reason to fear answering. What if every caller carried a hidden voice? What if silence felt safer—but answering was the only way to stop something terrible?

About the Novel

Blending psychological suspense, relationship secrets, missing-person mystery, and the claustrophobic fear of unwanted communication, Where Voices Go to Hide follows a woman whose unusual ability forces her to confront truths that others have spent years concealing. The novel explores:

Phone anxiety and the fear of unexpected communication
Secrets hidden within intimate relationships
The difference between spoken words and private intentions
Manipulation, obsession, and buried guilt
The dangerous consequences of believing you alone can hear the truth

This is a dark, atmospheric thriller for readers who enjoy morally complicated characters, unsettling domestic secrets, psychological tension, and stories in which the person uncovering the mystery may be hiding something too.

The Beginning of a New Series

Where Voices Go to Hide introduces the Phone Anxiety Thriller series, a collection of suspense novels centered on telephone calls, concealed voices, private fears, and the terrible things people reveal when they believe no one can hear what they are truly thinking.

The next installment, A Frequency of Secrets, is currently in development. The telephone may stop ringing. The voices do not.

Get Your Copy

Where Voices Go to Hide by Angela Grey is now available in paperback and ebook formats. Step into Elena Sterling’s world—but think carefully before answering the next call. Some voices speak aloud. Others wait beneath the words. And some truths should never be heard.

A Catalog of Small Cruelties

A Catalog of Small Cruelties

Another one of my novels came out of editorial backlog, and I’m so excited.

She wakes from a coma grieving children who never existed.
A coma gives Violet Holloway three dead children—and a reason to punish the living.
Every victim has a secret. Violet has a catalog.

There are some griefs so complete they begin to invent their own evidence.

When twenty-eight-year-old architect Violet Holloway wakes from a coma after a devastating car accident, she remembers three dead children no one else believes ever existed. Not her polished attorney husband, Silas Holloway. Not her exhausted social worker sister, Piper Langston. Not the doctors, the police, or the photographs that insist Violet had been alone that night.

Back home in their affluent Midwestern suburb, Violet begins writing a private manuscript she calls A Catalog of Small Cruelties—a meditation on motherhood, memory, neglect, and the terrible things people allow to happen to children when no one is looking.

Then the bodies begin appearing.

A disgraced foster parent abandoned in an orchard house.
A father left on a frozen trail.
A woman discovered beside a riverbank.
A corpse arranged inside a library after closing.
Another found at a campground swallowed by fog.

Each victim shares a chilling connection: somewhere in the exhausted late-night conversations of Piper’s child welfare caseload, their names had once surfaced beside accusations of neglect.

As detectives close in and the city spirals into fear, Violet’s grief begins to look less like trauma and more like design. Because the deeper her manuscript goes, the clearer one horrifying truth becomes:

Violet is not simply documenting the tragedy.

She is curating it.

Haunting, literary, and razor-sharp, A Catalog of Small Cruelties is a psychologically devastating suspense novel about invented motherhood, moral obsession, and the stories people tell themselves to survive the unbearable.