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.
I’ve always believed that the most courageous stories are not about rescue, but about return—how we come back to ourselves after the mind has turned against us. When I write about mental illness, I don’t write from a distance. I write from the thin edge of it—from the quiet hours where thought unravels and the only lifeline is language. Each of my novels—Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak—was born out of that liminal space between fear and faith, between survival and surrender.
These books aren’t companions by chronology, but by spirit. Each follows a young woman whose inner world threatens to eclipse the outer one, and each discovers that love—whether romantic, platonic, or self-forged—is the most powerful form of recovery we have.
1. The Mind as Haunted House: Secret Whispers
When I wrote Secret Whispers, I began with an image: a house stitched together by secrets, its silence louder than any scream. Inside it lives Adria—a painter, sister, caretaker, and reluctant witness to her own unraveling.
Schizophrenia shadows her family line, coiling like a whispered curse. Her brother’s breakdown has already split the household in half. Her mother holds everything together with brittle faith. And Adria, caught between caretaking and collapse, begins to hear the same whispers that once took him away.
I wanted to write honestly about what it means to live with a mind you can’t fully trust—the terror of not knowing whether what you see is symptom or sight. But I also wanted to write about love: the improbable, incandescent kind that dares to root itself in fractured soil.
In Secret Whispers, love doesn’t save Adria. It steadies her. The boy who sees her—awkward, hopeful, honest—doesn’t fix her illness; he becomes a mirror in which she can see more than diagnosis. Their love flickers like a candle in a draft, fragile yet real, proof that connection is possible even when perception splinters.
Adria’s resilience isn’t loud. It’s made of small gestures: washing a brush, opening a window, whispering not today when the shadows come. Recovery, I learned while writing her, is not a staircase but a spiral—you circle the same fears until you finally face them without flinching.
2. Déjà Vu: The Loops of the Bipolar Mind
If Secret Whispers was about hearing too much, Déjà Vu was about feeling too much—about living inside a mind where memory and mania blur.
Ivy Lancaster is eighteen, brilliant, impulsive, and newly diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She experiences life in echoes: every stranger’s face feels familiar, every nightmare seems rehearsed, every choice loops back like a record caught on its scratch.
The first time I wrote Ivy walking through the parking lot at dawn, barefoot and disoriented, I felt the pulse of the entire novel—this young woman spinning in the orbit of her own brain, terrified of herself yet desperate to be believed.
Déjà Vu is not just a psychological thriller; it’s an emotional x-ray of bipolarity. Mania is painted not as glamour but as velocity—the thrill that burns. Depression is written not as stillness but as suffocation. Yet in between, there’s the quiet miracle of awareness.
And there is love. Love arrives in Ivy’s world not as romance, but as recognition: people who refuse to define her by her disorder, who remind her that she exists beyond chemical imbalance. Love, in this book, is accountability—the friend who says take your meds, the parent who whispers you are more than your mind, the stranger who looks her in the eye when she feels invisible.
Resilience here is not recovery in the clinical sense. It’s survival as rebellion. It’s Ivy saying, I may live inside loops, but I can still choose where to step next.
When readers tell me Déjà Vu helped them feel seen—that it mirrored their manic spirals or the hollow aftermath—I’m reminded why I write these stories. To dismantle stigma. To remind us that living with mental illness is not a flaw in character, but a feat of endurance.
3. Of Laughter & Heartbreak: OCD and the Art of Staying
By the time I wrote Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I wanted to explore a different texture of the mind: the obsessive, ritualized patterns of control that masquerade as safety.
Stevie Matthews is almost sixteen. Her thoughts arrive like barbed wire; her rituals multiply like vines. When the summer’s order collapses, she’s hospitalized—a space she never asked for, but where, for the first time, she meets others who understand the language of compulsion.
OCD, for Stevie, is both prison and prayer. Her rituals aren’t about superstition; they’re about trying to keep the world from shattering. I wrote her story as both confession and communion—a letter to anyone who’s ever mistaken coping for control.
Behind those locked doors, Stevie meets her mirror selves: the anxious boy who collects facts like talismans, the quiet girl who hides notes to her future self, the nurse who knows that healing isn’t linear. Together they build something like family—a map stitched from shared fragments of hope.
This novel, like the others, carries the pulse of first love—not in grand gestures, but in small acts of belief. The hand that steadies hers during a panic spiral. The smile that says you are not too much. The love that grows not in spite of illness, but within it. Because love, at its truest, doesn’t demand wholeness—it meets you in the fragments and stays.
4. The Quiet Revolution of Survival
Each of these novels began with illness, but each ends with something larger: a reclamation of humanity.
In Secret Whispers, Adria learns that her art can hold what her mind cannot. In Déjà Vu, Ivy redefines truth beyond the lens of mania. In Of Laughter & Heartbreak, Stevie learns that control is not safety, and surrender is not defeat.
Together, they form a kind of triptych about resilience—the quiet kind that never makes headlines. They remind me that mental illness and first love often share the same vocabulary: vulnerability, risk, surrender, trust. Both require standing on the edge of the unknown and saying yes anyway.
To live with a brain that misfires is to live constantly between worlds—the real and the imagined, the lucid and the lost. Yet within that space, there’s beauty. There’s empathy. There’s art.
These are not stories about being cured. They’re stories about being human.
5. Why I Keep Writing
Sometimes readers ask why I return, again and again, to characters who struggle with their minds. My answer is simple: because I know what it means to stay.
Because the world still whispers that mental illness is weakness. Because the stories that saved me were the ones that refused to flinch. Because the young readers who see themselves in Adria, Ivy, and Stevie deserve to know they are not broken—they are becoming.
Writing these books has taught me that resilience isn’t the absence of relapse; it’s the decision to keep loving life anyway. It’s the courage to reach for connection even when your hands shake. It’s the soft defiance of building hope out of symptoms.
And maybe, at the center of it all, it’s first love—the thing that reminds us we’re still capable of wonder.
When I look back on Secret Whispers, Déjà Vu, and Of Laughter & Heartbreak, I see not a trilogy of illness, but a mosaic of endurance. Each girl walks through her own labyrinth and emerges carrying the same small flame: belief.
Belief that we are more than diagnosis. Belief that love is still possible in the dark. Belief that the quiet work of staying—of waking up again, and again—is itself a form of grace.
If these stories have a single message, it’s this: Even when the mind fractures, the heart remembers how to reach for light.
There are wounds that refuse to speak in complete sentences. They hum beneath the skin, pulsing with memory, waiting for a language tender enough to hold them. For years, I mistook my silence for strength. I believed that if I didn’t name the pain, it couldn’t touch me. But silence, I learned, is its own kind of bruise—one that deepens in the dark.
Writing became my way of translating ache into alphabet. In Nostalgic Tendencies, Idyllic Endeavors & Current Inclinations, I began experimenting with what healing might sound like if given voice. I wasn’t trying to craft perfection; I was trying to survive. Each essay attempted to name something that had long lived without language—the complicated inheritance of womanhood, the confusion of growing up inside both trauma and tenderness, the way love and loss often share the same room.
The alphabetic structure of that book—A to Z—was more than a creative choice. It was a lifeline. Some days, I could only manage a single word: Ache. Anger. Acceptance. Other days, I could stretch into sentences. By giving shape to the unspeakable, I was teaching myself how to live with it. Naming became an act of reclamation; description became a prayer.
Later, in Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful, I found that healing sometimes requires fewer words, not more. Depression dismantled grammar; mindfulness rebuilt it one breath at a time. When I was too exhausted to write paragraphs, I wrote sensations instead: the hum of the refrigerator, the pulse in my wrists, the sparrow outside the window refusing to give up its song. I learned that attention itself is a language—one that says, I see you. I’m still here.
That book explored the intersection between narrative and neurobiology — how the act of observing, naming, and breathing can rewire a weary mind. Where Nostalgic Tendencies dissected the emotional architecture of becoming, Bedridden & Gutted to Mindful was about learning to dwell inside the body again, to replace self-critique with curiosity.
Words, I realized, are not cures. They’re companions. They sit beside the wound, whispering, You are not alone. The act of writing them—or reading them—becomes a ceremony of recognition. There’s something almost sacred about saying the truth out loud, even if it trembles. Because once a story is spoken, it stops being a secret.
Healing, I’ve learned, has its own dialect—part ink, part silence. It’s the pause between paragraphs, the tremor before truth, the deep exhale after naming something that once terrified you. And when we find that dialect—when we learn to speak our pain without fear of breaking the room—something miraculous happens: the language begins to speak us back into being.
Maybe this is why we keep writing, even when it hurts. Because language is how we build a bridge from what was unbearable to what might be beautiful again.
Shady Oak Press (2025) ISBN: 978-1961841468 Reviewed by Stephanie Elizabeth Long for Reader Views (09/2025)
Abigail Whimsy and Lainey Bliss have been best friends since the second grade. Like yin and yang, their opposites somehow fit together like errant puzzle pieces. Whimsy exists in a world of vibrant dreams and imagination, while Lainey is pragmatic and even-keeled, which anchors Abigail. Because nothing good can last forever, the girls have one final summer together before Lainey goes off to a fancy college, leaving Abigail behind.
Before Lainey leaves, Abigail has devised a plan. They will create a map (complete with a detailed legend) and explore all the mysteries of their town—dismantle the “thin” places, using her late grandmother’s journal (chaotic musings) as a guide.
As they delve deeper into the journey, Abigail’s reality becomes skewed, and Lainey’s attempts to keep her friend’s sanity in check become more difficult. The places they visit awaken a humming within Abigail, and the more they add to the map, the louder the hum becomes.
Whimsy and Bliss is a coming-of-age literary masterpiece. Angela Gray’s writing is known for its vivid imagery and deep metaphors, and this novel is no exception. Readers will quickly be immersed in Abigail’s world of wanderlust, where magic and realism become blurred. Beyond that, the character-driven story explores themes of friendship, self-discovery, and bridging the transition from childhood to young adulthood.
Sometimes it can be hard to decipher the difference between imagination and illness. The author has done an excellent job of illustrating Abigail’s unraveling—the whispering of nature, the ebb and flow of the hum, and the excitement turned obsession. With every place Abigail and Lainey traversed, I fell more in tune with Abigail’s frequency, at times questioning what was real and what was fictitious—this is the type of story that makes you see the world differently.
Whimsy and Bliss certainly highlights the plight of mental illness, particularly hypomania. Still, at its core, the novel’s overarching message is one of connection and trust—it’s the impenetrable sisterhood between two young women on the cusp of adulthood. In a world that is often stuck in the me-versus-you mentality, the solidarity between friends is refreshing, teaching us that we don’t have to suffer alone; we can lean on others for support.
For readers who love young adult books about friendship and adventure with a focus on mental health, this literary gem will appeal to you. Angela Gray’s exquisite prose is unmatched, and the multilayered characters are memorable. Abigail and Lainey’s map of thin places will forever hold a special place in my heart.
Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness where contact with reality and insight are impaired, an example of psychosis. Symptoms of schizophrenia include psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and thought disorder (unusual ways of thinking), as well as reduced expression of emotions, reduced motivation to accomplish goals, difficulty in social relationships, motor impairment, and cognitive impairment.
Schizophrenia is a severe, long-term mental health condition that requires lifelong treatment, even when symptoms subside. Treatment with medications and psychosocial therapy can help manage the condition. In some cases, hospitalization may be needed.
Medications are the cornerstone of schizophrenia treatment, and antipsychotic medications like Seroquel, Risperdal, Lithium, or Haldol are the most commonly prescribed drugs.
First generation antipsychotic medications, meaning discovered in the 1950s, formed one of the greatest breakthroughs in psychiatry. However, first-generation antipsychotics have frequent and potentially significant neurological side effects, including the possibility of developing a movement disorder (tardive dyskinesia) that may or may not be reversible. Fortunately, for me it was in my case. Newer, second-generation medications are often preferred because they pose a lower risk of serious side effects than do first-generation antipsychotics.
Newer mood stabilizers are also used to treat the condition, as is in my case. Mood stabilizers work for me because the hallucinations and delusions vary based on my mood. For example, on New Year’s Day of this year, I was admitted to the emergency room for breathing problems and an upper respiratory infection that was not COVID but was severe enough to scare me. And with the added stressor of loved ones not being allowed into the room with me, the voices were incredibly terrifying. So, my mood being down, the voices were predominantly negative, suggesting that I take my own life. The following three weeks found no relief since I was put on prednisone, a glucocorticoid, which amplifies feelings and/or conditions. In my case that was the negative voices.
On the other hand, I’m typically even-keeled, and some say optimistic a good portion of the time. So, the limited voices correspond to my mood and reveal themselves to be cathartic, even encouraging, but mainly limited in their ferocity thanks to the mood stabilizer, Abilify, which I’m on maximum dosage. After a few more months of this leveling off, I’ll go back down to a moderate dose. But, after many years of being overly optimistic about my condition, I’ve come to the realization that I’ll be on a mood stabilizer, if not anti-psychotic, the rest of my life.
In addition to medication, there is the ongoing psychosocial therapy. That too, will be lifelong, hopefully not as often as I’m currently required to see the therapist. So, like the 3.5 million others battling this mental illness and the 100,000 new diagnoses each year, I will continue to press onward and upward so that I’m not in the 3.5 times more likely who ultimately take their lives. Schizophrenia isn’t a death sentence and many of us with it choose to say we battle it as opposed to suffer from it.
The most difficult thing to deal with, for many, isn’t the disease itself but the stigma surrounding it; but, for me, that’s probably in part to my social anxiety disorder, which is a comorbidity. Schizophrenia is most often seen in patients that have an underlying or overlapping condition such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, OCD, and panic disorder, which makes it difficult to diagnose and why so many suffer without the therapies, whether medication or psychotherapy, that assists them in battling the condition.
Fourteen-year-old British teen Audrey is making slow but steady progress dealing with her anxiety disorder, which she developed after a car accident and tremendously difficult bullying. This mysterious altercation(s) with the mean girls at her school has sent her deep into an anxiety spiral so her life has changed dramatically since she has been battling depression and anxiety disorders. She is now always wearing dark sunglasses, unable to leave the house, doesn’t attend school, and has an attack if she talks to anyone besides her family. Audrey records what goes on in her house since she has a very hard time going outside and the drama of her family. Her brother Linus’ friend comes into the picture, and her recovery gains momentum.
This YA romance novel with excellent dialogue was a witty and sassy quick read. It showed us the recovery from mental illness as opposed to the descent into it that many others reveal. Her dysfunctional family provided some comic relief, even though the author kept the mental illness topic gentler and more lightweight than other books on the same subject.
It was a lighthearted, limited angst, ofttimes humorous story about teen life, anxiety, first love, and family love that discussed mental health therapy techniques, but I’d have loved to hear more of the backstory that caused her the issues the book talks about.
A whole range of mental health issues are acquired or maintained through the development of delusional beliefs about ourselves and our world. Even the most common mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression, are rooted by ingrained, strongly held delusional beliefs about ourselves or the world. Uncontrollable worrying is extremely common. Just think: Are my worries five, ten years ago, still relevant concerns today? And will they still be our worries in five, ten years from now? So, which delusional (not reflected by reality) beliefs do we chronic worriers hold now?
1. “I’m a born worrier.” or ” I’ve got to worry, so don’t even try to change me.”
2. “If I worry about something, it’s likely to happen.”
3. “Just because something I worried about in the past didn’t happen doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future.”
4. “Worrying will prevent bad things happening.”
5. “If I’m anxious about something, it must mean it’s a threat or a problem, so I should worry about it.”
6. “I must think through all the possible things that might happen otherwise I won’t be prepared.”
7. “If I let other people know what they do makes me worry, they will change their behavior.”
8. “It is better to spend a lot of time thinking about a problem than making a snap decision.”
I realize it’s not simple or easy but these delusional beliefs have to be analyzed in the safety of the therapist’s office. It may not be something we look forward to but it is our goal for better mental health and positive repercussions.
I’ve been receiving psychotherapy since I was twelve plus in and out of group therapy from the age of fifteen. So why is it now that I’m being prompted to add other psychosocial treatments to the mix. I know the response: to improve socialization. However, doesn’t class work count towards psychosocial therapy?
Psychosocial treatments include cognitive behavioral therapy (changing negative thought patterns), family education, occupational therapy, group and family psychotherapy, and cognitive remediation. They are thought to help lessen schizophrenia symptoms, learn new skills, help in coping with the illness, prevent relapse, and achieve a connection with others.I already learn new skills from all the classes that I take. Regarding the compensatory learning strategies, I think the classes I’m in also aid in memory, planning, organizing, and concentration. I think this blogging helps, too. It allows me an outlet to journal experiences each day. In that way, it will aid in preventing relapse by getting feedback from my family members in order to stay focused on being mentally healthy.
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