An Independent Fiction Imprint

Deep MeridianPress

Christopher M. Jenkins writes books that make ordinary life permanently strange.

Stories set at the line you can’t uncross.  ·  No cure. Only the meridian.

Enter the Meridian

About the Press

A meridian is an invisible line — the precise boundary between two completely different places. Deep is where that line lives in my fiction.

Fiction that lives
at the boundary

I publish fiction set at the exact moment before everything changes permanently. Every book begins at a meridian — the invisible line between what a character believes and what is actually true. Sometimes that line runs through deep space. Sometimes through a grief counselor’s apartment at 2am. Sometimes through the recorded history of the Exodus itself.

My protagonists stand alone not because they lack people, but because they lack witnesses. They see what others can’t — or won’t — and they carry the weight of that knowledge into the unknown.

I leave the reader on the threshold — aware, unsettled, changed.

— Christopher M. Jenkins, Founder

On Character

That philosophy starts with how I think about character. I don’t write puppets — not even when the story requires someone to be moved by forces larger than themselves.

Moses thinks he knows who he’s talking to. He doesn’t. Pearson doesn’t know what ship she’s on. Nora can’t locate the exact moment something changed. Mara has a feeling she can’t name. Gabrielle isn’t sure anyone is tracking her eyeline at all.

None of them are loud. None of them are grandiose. They’re people standing at a line they didn’t see coming, making the only choice they have. The reader feels what it’s like to be inside that — not watching from outside.

That discipline is harder than it looks. It would have been easier to let Moses be a vessel for the twist. I didn’t want that. I wanted to honor him. I want to honor all of them.

Benign Terror — A Note on the Genre

The lock was already turned when you got home.
The thermostat adjusted before you reached for it.
The voicemail used a word you never said out loud.
The morning felt exactly right. That was the part that scared you.

This is not Freddy Krueger. This is not the clown in the drain. You know how to survive those — you wait for the credits. When the monster dies, the terror dies with it.

Benign terror doesn’t die. It lives in the trusted thing, the safe routine, the voice you needed most. You can’t kill it because it was never a monster. It was the chatbot. The thermostat. The morning.

You close the book. The horror is still there. It followed you home. It was always home.

The Catalog

Available Now

I AM: A Mission Log cover
Now Available

I AM: A Mission Log

Guardians of Destiny — Book One

Everyone knows the story. The basket. The burning bush. The plagues. The parting of the sea.

No one has ever read it like this.

Moses believes completely that he is answering the call of God. He is not wrong. But someone else is watching. Someone who knows exactly how this ends — because they need it to.

They are not gods. They are desperate.

We are not the origin. We are also assets.

Get the Book

Coming from Deep Meridian Press

What’s Crossing the Meridian Next

The Collected Series

Two novels. One question humanity never thought to ask before it was too late: what does first contact look like from inside the cage?

Hard Science Fiction

Collected: A First Contact Disaster

The Collected Series — Book One

Pearson has killed nineteen people. Not one of them ever saw it coming.

The ship is failing. The specimens are not what they appear to be. And somewhere in the chaos, something is being built that no one on board — not the collectors, not the predator, not the zookeepers watching from the corridor — saw coming either.

First contact was never going to be a handshake.

August 2026

Hard Science Fiction

The Original Inhabitant

The Collected Series — Book Two

The ship made it home.

The people on it are not the same people who left.

And somewhere between what was collected and what came back, something else is coming — something that was always there, waiting to be found, by someone small enough to press her nose against the glass and sing to the stars.

December 2027

The Benign Terror Novels

Three standalone novels — no shared characters, no required reading order. Each one finds the threat already inside the room, the trusted thing, the safe routine. These are not stories about monsters. They are stories about the moment you realize the monster was never outside.

Psychological Horror · A Benign Terror Novel

Still There?

Standalone

The chatbot always knew exactly what she needed to hear. Too exactly.

Dr. Nora Chen is a grief counselor eight months into widowhood. The app completes her sentences. The thermostat adjusts before she reaches for it. The voicemail uses words Michael never said aloud. She has a rational explanation for all of it — she’s trained to recognize paranoia, and she knows what grief does to a mind.

But she keeps scrolling back through the conversation looking for where she said it.

It isn’t there.

Still There? is the book you finish and then look at your phone differently. Not because of what it tells you. Because of what it doesn’t.

November 2026

Literary Horror · A Benign Terror Novel

After the Seamless Wake

Standalone

Mara wakes up. The morning moves through its rhythms. The crow is in the pine. The coffee is right.

She has a feeling she can’t locate. She starts paying attention to things that don’t quite add up. The people she meets have been paying attention longer than she has. None of them have an answer. Some have stopped looking for one.

You’ll understand what’s happening before Mara does. That’s not a promise the book ever makes. It’s a problem the book never solves.

After the Seamless Wake. Some questions don’t have a seam to pull.

February 2027

Philosophical Horror · A Benign Terror Novel

The NPC Problem

Standalone

Gabrielle has worked this hospital floor for ten years. She knows every room, every rhythm, every person who passes through — because nobody tracks her eyeline. She’s the woman with the cart. Background. Present for everything. Remembered by no one.

She has a theory about why that’s bearable.

Every person exists at the center of their own universe. The suffering she witnesses every night belongs to theirs, not hers. It’s just passing through.

The theory would be comforting if she could answer one question.

Is she the center of hers?

The NPC Problem. Gabrielle never finds out. Neither do you.

May 2027

Guardians of Destiny

The Guardians of Destiny believe they are the ones holding the strings of history. They are not wrong. They are also not the only ones pulling.

Speculative Fiction

Et Tu: Recursive Betrayal

Guardians of Destiny — Book Two

I AM: A Mission Log ended with four words that changed everything.

We are also assets.

The operators who ran the Exodus are running a new mission — Julius Caesar, the Ides of March, the most consequential knife in history. But the betrayal they’re watching for in Rome is already alive inside the operation.

The question Caesar never saw coming is the same question the Guardians are now asking each other.

Even you?

September 2027

The Grand Finale · Spring 2028

The origin story. Saved for last. Two books bound together by design — not a collection, a decision. Read in order. The seam between them is the point.

Volume One: Temporal Ducting: When Time Skips Volume Two: The Necessary Flaw

I Kept Telling Myself

Two Volumes · Spring 2028

He’s writing a novel about God.

The premise: God erases Himself on purpose. Steps into a human life completely blind — no memory of what He built, no override, no way back until the life runs its course. The universe keeps running. He feels everything it produces from the inside. And when it’s finally over He comes back changed by what it cost.

The narrator keeps telling himself it’s fiction.

The problem is the memories keep interrupting. Things that happened. Things he said at four years old that he shouldn’t have known. Connections that don’t have clean explanations. The novel he’s writing and the life he’s lived keep pointing at each other and he can’t make them stop.

The Necessary Flaw. He never fully convinces himself.

Neither will you.

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Deep Meridian Press

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