Author’s First Novel Debuts 30 Years after His First Attempt to Get It Published

Thriller Stranger Still Waited Three Decades for Its Time

Infernal Moose Publishing is releasing George Ochoa’s thrillerStranger Still today—nearly 30 years after the author first tried to get the novel published.

Stranger Still is the story of Paul Inster, a brilliant but insane Columbia college student majoring in English with an undisclosed minor in knives, who is in love with a graduate student in English, Tracy Iridio. Seeing her in the library every day, he mistakenly believes she loves him back, but she does not know who he is. When, for the first time, he sees her with her boyfriend, classical history professor Larry Post, Paul sets out to destroy Larry.

Ochoa, himself a Columbia graduate, wrote the novel in 1995. Then 34 and living in Brooklyn, he engaged the late literary agent Jane Jordan Browne to represent it. For nearly two years, Browne shopped the novel to publishers without success. After Browne dropped the novel, declaring there was a “consensus from the market,” Ochoa sent it around himself to more publishers. In 1999, he finally gave up.

“I thought it was the best thing I’d ever written,” says Ochoa, “but it seemed like the market at that time didn’t want it. So I went on to other things.”

The other things included 35 published nonfiction books that he wrote or cowrote and several published short stories, essays, and poems. He went on to make a living as a medical writer and a writer of nonprofit communications. But he never published Stranger Still or any other novel.

Until 2024. In April of this year, Ochoa, now 63, asked a question on X (formerly known as Twitter): “What is the best thing you’ve ever written? For me, I believe it was an unpublished novel called STRANGER STILL.”

Jake Keuhlen, founder of the independent publisher Infernal Moose Publishing, happened to see this post and asked, “Why is it unpublished?”

Ochoa answered, “Couldn’t find a publisher.”

Keuhlen offered to take a look. He and his team liked it (feeling both “uneasy” and “intrigued” by the writing) and agreed to publish it. “It was like discovering a lost gem,” says Keuhlen.

Ochoa is pleased to see the novel published but not entirely surprised. “I always thought there was an audience for this novel,” he says. “It just took a while to find it.”

Stranger Still is available on Amazon.