(MENAFN- EIN Presswire) EINPresswire / -- When elite students at Santo Domingo's most prestigious Catholic school set out to expose their sadistic teacher, they didn't just uncover a monster - they created one. Mortal Vengeance, the haunting debut novel by Dominican author Alejandro Torres De la Rocha, is a razor-sharp psychological thriller about complicity, cowardice, mental health, and the institutional silence that allows abuse to thrive.

Originally released on Amazon/Kindle in June 2025 (ebook, paperback, and hardcover), the novel now reaches a wider global audience with ebook availability on Google Play Store, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo, beginning November 17. To mark the expansion, the ebook is available at no cost on all platforms except Amazon through November 30 (with Barnes & Noble readers able to use promo code BNPMV4FREE).

The book has already become a BookRaid Best Seller in the thriller category and is currently on the SHORT LIST for the 2025 Dante Rossetti Book Awards for Young Adult Fiction.

A Story Decades in the Making

Mortal Vengeance began in 1999, when Torres De la Rocha was a frustrated 15-year-old who had just failed Spanish class. His parents didn't ban the computer - they took the phone cable, killing his dial-up connection. With no internet, no escape, and emotions he couldn't name, he turned to writing.

“Out of that anger and isolation,” he says,“I wrote the earliest version of this story. I didn't know it then, but writing was the only way I could process feelings I didn't yet understand.” Years later, he would learn that many of those emotional extremes were shaped by borderline personality disorder. Revisiting the manuscript as an adult allowed him to confront the systems, silences, and psychological patterns that shaped him.

The novel still carries the skeleton of that early draft, but it has evolved into something deeper, darker, more Dominican, and far more psychologically honest.

A Pressure Cooker of Guilt and Consequences

Set in the suffocating halls of Excelsior Academy, an elite Catholic school in Santo Domingo, Mortal Vengeance follows a group of friends whose carefully planned revenge spirals into chaos. After a brutal prank goes wrong, their school becomes a crucible of guilt, fear, emotional volatility, and buried truths.

At the heart of the novel lies a question shaped by the author's twelve years in Jesuit school:

If you witness injustice and stay silent, how innocent are you?

Why It Resonates - And What Sets It Apart

. A grounded exploration of borderline personality disorder

Fear of abandonment, identity instability, emotional dysregulation, and distorted perception shape key turning points and character choices.

. A focus on institutional complicity

The story examines how silence - rather than conspiracy - is what protects abusers.

. A cast of morally gray characters

There are no heroes here. Only consequences.

. A deeply Dominican setting

Power structures, social hierarchy, Catholic elitism, generational silence, and cultural pressure shape every conflict.

. A Dominican folkloric twist via the Grim Cojuelo

Inspired by the Diablo Cojuelo of Dominican carnival tradition, the author reinvents him as a chilling embodiment of guilt, fear, and the consequences that stalk the students.

A Expanding Universe

Mortal Vengeance marks the beginning of a planned slasher trilogy, each entry following the shifting dangers and survivors that emerge after every reckoning.

Running parallel is The Grim Saga, a canon series of prequels exploring the cultural and institutional rot behind the events of the main storyline.
Book 0, Mortal Vengeance: A Grim Tale, is set 18 months before Book 1 and is currently serialized on Wattpad with weekly chapter releases. The final chapter arrives on January 1, 2026.

The sequel, Mortal Vengeance II, is currently underway, with a companion sequel to A Grim Tale also planned.

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