State College Book Launch Party Features Local Author

Local author Sarah K. Stephens’ debut psychological thriller, A Flash of Red, will be featured at a book launch party at 7:30 p.m. on Friday at Webster’s Bookstore Cafe, 133 E. Beaver Ave.

The event is free and open to the public and will involve a reading, book signing and refreshments. The book will be available for purchase at the store.

Focusing on three main characters, A Flash of Red details the chaos that ensues when mental illness invades our most intimate relationships.

Professor Anna Klein and her husband, Sean, are a young couple each struggling with their own misperceptions of reality. While Anna’s daily anxieties turn on the axis of her mother’s path into psychosis, Sean escapes to the alternate reality of love and sex offered online. When Bard, a student of Anna’s, develops his own obsession with the couple, their already unsteady world collapses with irrevocable consequences. A Flash of Red ultimately asks the question: What happens when we can no longer tell the difference between what we want and what is real?

The book is published by Pandamoon Publishing.

Sarah K. Stephens is a pen name for Sarah Kollat, a senior instructor in Penn State University’s Department of Human Development and Family Studies.