E. K. Moon

COMING THIS FALL

On GILDED, every friendship has a price, every betrayal has a sponsor, and no woman is ever truly off camera.

For eleven seasons, Celeste Baron and the women of television’s most glamorous reality franchise have surrendered their homes, careers, secrets, and worst nights to Bellwether. Their feuds sell handbags. Their grief drives engagement. Whatever happens to them becomes property.

Then the show broadcasts Celeste’s murder.

The only problem is that Celeste is still alive.

As Bellwether scrambles to control the story, a priceless portrait becomes the primary target for Celeste—and the women discover the first crack in the machinery around them. Cameras can be blinded. Locked doors can be opened. The truth can escape. But production is already steering them toward a remote estate, where armed men are waiting and every woman has something terrible to hide.

To survive, Celeste must trust the women she has been paid to hate. Together, they must attempt the one act GILDED was never built to withstand: choosing one another.

Viciously glamorous, darkly funny, and relentlessly suspenseful, GILDED is a speculative thriller about manufactured fame, weaponized friendship, and what happens when women cast as enemies refuse the ending written for them.

Releases SEPTEMBER 3rd on AMAZON KINDLE | Paperback and Hardcover editions coming FALL 2026

Austin Reed came to New York to become someone else. He never expected that someone to be dead.

Broke and desperate to prove he belongs at the Samuel Warren Conservatory of Dramatic Art, a legendary acting school, Austin accepts a peculiar job: recreating the videos of Mickey Hughes, a beloved internet chef whose face was never shown. Mickey is dead. His audience doesn’t know it. Austin has the hands, the voice, and the training to keep him alive.

But the deeper Austin disappears into the role, the stranger his own life becomes. His reflection falls out of step. Recordings contain movements no camera captured. A rival discovers how to leave pieces of himself inside an audience. And Warren’s celebrated lineage—passed from master to student for generations—begins to look less like an artistic tradition than a method of preservation.

Someone inside Warren has been waiting for an actor like Austin: talented enough to surrender himself completely, ambitious enough to mistake surrender for success.

To protect himself and the people he loves, Austin must discover what Warren is making of him—before the performance outlives the performer.

A singer chosen by the machine. A village matriarch silenced for defying it. A country watching them both.

In 1972 Busan, South Korea, eighteen-year-old Song Jin-soo dreams of the stage, but music has always felt like a future meant for someone else. When his voice catches the attention of a powerful entertainment company, he is pulled into a world where fame becomes surveillance, and every choice has a price.

As rehearsals intensify and public scrutiny closes in, Jin-soo must learn to perform both onstage and off, preserving the image the industry demands while hiding the one truth that could destroy him: his growing attachment to Ryusei, a Japanese boy whose presence is as intoxicating as it is dangerous.

Across the coast, Mrs. Choi, a reclusive kimchi artisan and war survivor, secretly runs a network for defectors fleeing the North. When violence shatters her sanctuary, Mrs. Choi is dragged into a national crisis, igniting tensions Jin-soo never meant to touch.

As sabotage, lies, and conspiracy gather around The Aces’ debut, Jin-soo and Mrs. Choi are drawn toward a collision neither could have imagined. One that will force them to confront hidden truths, divided loyalties, and the cost of surviving.