Please Look at Me (A Friday the 13th Story, #9)

Brittany Varon is an Autophagian—a growing, controversial movement that fuses biology, spirituality, and radical self-renewal. Through ritual fasting and conscious consumption, Autophagians claim to transcend the limits of ordinary bodies: healing without medicine, pain without suffering, strength without sustenance. What begins as an intensely personal practice is increasingly scrutinized—and condemned—by the outside world. Brittany and her husband are popular influencers within the movement, sharing their journey online and defending Autophagia as a path of discipline and rebirth, but when a documentary exposes the movement's architect as a fraud, public backlash erupts. The movement fractures; believers turn on one another, and faith hardens into defiance. Among them is Tatyana Brigam, a devoted Autophagian whose response to the attack is not doubt, but escalation. As scrutiny becomes persecution in her eyes, Tatyana pushes Autophagia toward extremism, calling out dissenters as heretics. Brittany must reckon with what the practice is becoming—and whether belief, once radicalized, can ever be contained.