CONTROL. IT IS the one thing you lose the moment you step into a high-control group, and it is the hardest thing to claw back once you leave. It slips away quietly at first, disguised as devotion or discipline.
But eventually, you wake up and realize you don’t even control your own thoughts. You are a passenger in your own life, steering toward a cliff someone else chose for you.
People often ask me where the rage in my books comes from. They ask how I come up with the dark, twisted scenarios that my protagonist, Nadine Singh, has to navigate in novels like Bad Habit and False Idol.
The answer is simple, though the reality is complicated. I write vigilante justice thrillers because, for a long time, justice was something I didn’t have access to.
The Suffocation of Silence
As a cult survivor, I know intimately what it feels like to have your voice silenced. I know the suffocation of living under arbitrary rules that change on a whim.
I know the feeling of total helplessness when a charismatic leader manipulates your reality, telling you that up is down and pain is love.
When you survive that kind of psychological dismantling, you don’t just walk away and forget it. You carry a shadow with you.
You walk away with a burning, unanswerable question that keeps you up at night: What if I had fought back? What if, instead of submitting, I had stood up and burned the whole thing down?
That question is the heartbeat of the Nadine Singh series. It is the engine that drives every plot and every punch.
The Birth of the Ex-Nun Vigilante
When I sat down to create Nadine, I knew immediately that I didn’t want a standard police procedural hero. I didn’t want a detective who had to file paperwork.
Cops have to follow the law, and the law often fails the victims of psychological abuse. The law is designed for physical crimes, for stolen cars and broken windows.
It is rarely equipped to handle the systemic manipulation of a high-control group or the crushing weight of institutional betrayal. I needed someone who operated outside the lines.
I needed a character who didn’t care about “admissibility of evidence,” but cared deeply about right and wrong.
Nadine is an ex-nun vigilante. That specific background isn’t an accident or a gimmick. It is a mirror of my own history, reflected through a different lens.
Like many survivors, Nadine knows the interior of a rigid, dogmatic system. She knows the smell of incense and the weight of silence.
The Power of Breaking Vows
She knows what it means to take a vow of obedience, to prostrate oneself before an authority figure and surrender agency.
And more importantly, she knows the explosive power of breaking that vow. There is a specific kind of fury that comes from realizing your loyalty was weaponized against you.
By making her an ex-nun, I could explore the transition from spiritual submission to righteous fury. I could chart the path from “holy obedience” to “holy terror.”
She isnāt just punishing criminals; she is dismantling the very idea that predators can hide behind power, influence, or false piety.
When Nadine takes down a corrupt leader or a violent abuser, she is destroying the symbols of authority that once held her captive.
Fiction as the Ultimate Reclamation
Writing these thrillers allows me to take the chaos of my past and order it into a narrative where the good guys actually win.
In the real world, justice is slow, messy, and often absent. The villains often retire to comfortable mansions, protected by lawyers and non-disclosure agreements.
But in the world of my books, the scales are balancedāoften aggressively. There is no plea bargain for the monsters in Nadineās world.
Fiction allows me to rewrite the ending. It gives me the god-like power to ensure that suffering is answered with retribution.
It is a controlled environment where I can safely explore the darkest parts of human nature, knowing that I have the power to bring the light back by the final chapter.
The Avatar of the Powerless
Nadine Singh is the avatar for everyone who has ever felt powerless. She is the proxy for every person who has been told to sit down and shut up.
She is the one who enters the room when the police say their hands are tied. She is the solution when the system shrugs its shoulders at your pain.
She represents the force of nature that proves that while you may have been a victim, you don’t have to stay one. You can evolve.
When readers cheer for Nadine, they aren’t just cheering for a fight scene. They are cheering for the idea that the underdog can bite back.
They are cheering for the restoration of agency. It is a vicarious reclaiming of power for anyone who has ever felt small.
The Psychology of Survival
I write vigilante justice thrillers not just to entertain, but to explore the psychology of survival. The genre is often dismissed as pulp, but I think it serves a vital emotional function.
Itās about turning the trauma of the past into the fuel for a better future, even if itās a fictional one. It is about alchemy.
You take the lead of your sufferingāthe memories of fear, the years of lost timeāand you hammer it until it becomes steel.
You turn the passive experience of being a victim into the active experience of being a creator. I control the narrative now.
I decide who lives, who dies, and who gets what they deserve. That is the ultimate freedom for a cult survivor.
A Quiet Victory
For me, every bad guy Nadine takes down is a small, quiet victory for the part of me that remembers what it was like to be powerless.
Every time she outsmarts a manipulator, I am healing a little piece of my own history. I am proving to myself that I am no longer that naive young man who was tricked.
And for my readers, I hope itās a reminder that even when the system fails, the human spirit is resilient.
We are a force to be reckoned with. We can break the chains, we can leave the fold, and we can write our own stories.
Sometimes, the pen is mightier than the sword. But in Nadineās case, itās fun to have both.
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About the Author
Michael J. Mallen is a psychological thriller author and a survivor of coercive mind control. He draws on his real-world experience with dark psychology to deconstruct predatory behavior in his blog and his fiction. He is the author of the Nadine Singh Thrillers.Ā