It hits you in the oddest moments. A familiar Rush song playing, and suddenly your brain latches onto a weird, sticky question. What if a guardian angel just…clocked out? Not a grand rebellion, just a quiet exit. That’s where this began for Del Suede. A stray thought during “Working Them Angels” that refused to leave. It festered, of course. Grew into something darker, a story about a care home where death is suspiciously absent. No Place For Evil isn’t
No Place For Evil: A Guardian Angel Horror Novel Inspired by Rush by Del Suede
Rush has always been one of my favorite bands. Not in the casual, “I like a few songs” way, but in the deeper sense. The kind of affection that settles in, rearranges the furniture, and becomes part of how you think. Their music was never background noise for me. It demanded attention, and I was happy to give it. Lyrics to unpack, rhythms that refused to behave, and melodies that felt engineered by someone who assumed the listener could keep up.
One afternoon, I was watching footage from their Clockwork Angels tour. The song was “Working Them Angels.” I had heard it many times before, just as I’d heard every corner of their catalog more times than I could reasonably defend. Rush lived in heavy rotation in my listening habits. I once told my wife, with complete sincerity, that Rush would never release enough music to satisfy me. There was always room for one more album, one more song, one more verse that hinted at something larger than itself. None of us knew then that their remaining time together as the band we loved was already running short.
As the song played, something unexpected happened. Not an epiphany exactly, more like a mental tap on the shoulder. A question surfaced fully formed, as if it had been waiting for the right moment to announce itself. What would happen if a guardian angel took time off? Not retired. Not fallen. Just stepped away. What would that absence look like, and how quickly would things unravel? Would the damage be subtle at first, or would the world immediately begin to creak and buckle under the missing weight?
I can’t remember if I stopped the concert or let it continue playing. That detail has been erased by what came next. What I do remember clearly is grabbing a notebook and a pen. Yes, I write everything longhand, the same way the cavemen did. I have stacks of filled notebooks to prove it, each one a fossil record of half-formed thoughts, abandoned scenes, and the occasional miracle that refuses to stay quiet. This was one of those moments. The idea didn’t ask politely. It insisted.
From there, the story did what stories often do when they are determined. It took on its own momentum, weaving itself together with pieces of real life, borrowed emotions, and experiences that suddenly found a new context. It drifted between the imagined and the familiar, blurring the line just enough to make things uncomfortable in the right way. The kind of discomfort that suggests you’re circling something true.
The names, of course, have been changed to protect the innocent. Or at least to give them plausible deniability. Insert sly grin here. What remained unchanged was the question that started it all, born from a Rush song playing in a living room on an ordinary day. What happens when the angels stop working, even briefly, and no one notices until it’s far too late?
No Place For Evil by Del Suede
When Darlene Saunders accepts a position at West-Haven Care, she hopes for a fresh start and a chance to keep the promise she made to her late grandmother: to care for the elderly with heart. But something about West-Haven defies logic – Death never arrives and Cora Place is always nearby.
Darlene shrugs off the strange patterns but then come the anomalies: a patient record from 1967 that lists Cora’s age as sixty-four and a former nurse whispering that the dead don’t belong among the living.
Some souls are meant to guide – others are meant to be kept out. On the road between life and death, not everyone is just passing through. If the wrong one finds a way in, there may be no safe place at all.
No Place for Evil.
For fans of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones and Mitch Albom’s The Five People You Meet in Heaven, No Place for Evil is a powerful story of love and what waits beyond the veil — a haunting exploration of finding meaning when all seems lost, and the quiet souls who help us find our way.
No Place For Evil – Amazon
Suede Publishing – website
Del Suede
Del Suede’s work blends dark humor with the quietly unsettling. He is the author of the gothic horror novel Beyond the Gates and supernatural thriller No Place For Evil. His short fiction often draws on family lore, regional oddity, and psychological unease.
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