The Vicious Circuit Books in Order

The Vicious Circuit is a three-book horror series that starts with The Unnoticeables and runs through The Empty Ones and Kill All Angels. The basic idea is simple, and nasty. There are angels, but they are not kind. In Brockway's version, they study human lives for patterns and redundancies, then try to solve people by cutting those things away. What sounds abstract becomes concrete very fast, missing friends, ruined bodies, cults, monsters, and whole scenes getting swallowed by something bigger than they can understand.

It gets weird fast.

One side of the story follows Carey, a hard-drinking punk in 1977 New York. He starts as the kind of guy who wants cheap beer, a fight, and maybe enough cash to keep moving, but the disappearance of his friends pulls him into a hidden war. Across the trilogy, his thread moves from New York to London and eventually Los Angeles, and the changing punk scenes matter. Brockway uses clubs, squats, alleys, Chinatown, and street-level friendships to keep the books grounded even when the supernatural horror gets wild.

The other major thread belongs to Kaitlyn, who arrives in 2013 Los Angeles hoping to make a career as a stuntwoman and instead runs into the same nightmare from another angle. Her side of the story brings the series into Hollywood, desert highways, border towns, and back to LA again. As the books go on, she learns that she is not just a witness to the chaos. She has a part to play in it, and that discovery gives the trilogy much of its forward drive.

Along the way, the books pile up a whole catalogue of bad news, the Unnoticeables themselves, the Empty Ones, tar men, violent cults, and people who have been altered into something half human and half wreckage. The horror is graphic, but it is never only about shock. These novels are also very funny, very angry, and very aware of how scenes, friendships, and cities get chewed up by power. The punk element is not just decoration. It is the series' way of looking at resistance.

Read them in order.

What you should expect, overall, is a trilogy that mixes body horror, dark fantasy, apocalypse talk, and black comedy without getting too tidy. Each book has its own movement and setting, but the real appeal is the long arc, watching damaged, stubborn people build a rough kind of found family while trying to stop a cosmic system that treats humanity like a math problem. If you like your horror loud, strange, and funny, this is Brockway in a very Brockway mode.