In a culture bent on metrics and mistrust, a debut novel argues for intuition as responsibility—not spectacle.
When a novelist says a book was “shaped by Buffalo,” it often means geography or grit. In the case of The Invisible Eye—a paranormal conspiracy thriller by Sparrow Hall—the Buffalo imprint is stranger and more specific: a lineage of psychic culture radiating from Lily Dale, the historic hamlet an hour south of the city, and a creative restlessness sparked during the author’s time at the University at Buffalo.
Hall—who studied at UB in the fall of 1994 before settling in New York’s Capital Region—frames the novel against two worlds that rarely share a shelf: New York City’s image-driven fashion industry and the shadowed interiors of upstate New York. At the center is Catherine Harper, a woman with a psychic sensitivity she would rather mute than make known. Her ability unsettles her relationships, complicates her career, and—at first—feels more like a drain than a gift. Over the course of the story, that reluctance turns to resolve as she realizes the only way to decode her past, and her father’s classified research, is to trust the faculty she has been trying to manage away.
That pivot—from concealment to ownership—gives the book its voltage. It’s also where the Buffalo connection matters most.
A town that identifies with the in-between
Lily Dale, founded in the late 19th century, is one of the rare American communities where psychic identity is not whispered but named, practiced, and protected. Hall researched there not to set scenes but to take the measure of a place where intuition is a public posture. If Catherine represents the urban professional who hides her second sight to be taken seriously, Lily Dale is the counter-example: a living archive of mediums, open-air readings, and porch-to-porch talk about the unseen.
That contrast—between a town that voices the unseen and a protagonist who keeps her sight under wraps—drives the novel’s cultural argument. What social and personal costs come from suppressing capacities that don’t fit institutional expectations? And what happens when those capacities are finally given language and responsibility? By placing Catherine’s private struggle against a public tradition that has weathered more than a century of skepticism, The Invisible Eye refuses the usual binary between empirical life and esoteric sense. It treats them as overlapping maps.
The discipline of the unseen
A Rochester native, Hall attended the University at Buffalo (UB), where he studied cultural anthropology under Professor Phillips Stevens Jr., a leading scholar of religion, superstition, and occult traditions. In Stevens’ classroom, the supernatural wasn’t a punchline; it was a human system—ritual, symbol, altered states—worthy of serious study. That framework stayed with Hall, shaping The Invisible Eye’s treatment of the occult not as fantasy but as a durable part of culture: marginalized, yes, but persistent.
Another Buffalo imprint comes via Terry Iacuzzo, the Buffalo-born psychic and author of Small Mediums at Large. Her memoir about growing up in a family of psychics left a tangible mark on the book’s ethics: sensitivity as inheritance more than stunt, craft more than spectacle. The influence is visible in Catherine’s arc. Rather than glamorizing second sight, the novel treats it as something messy, intimate, and communal—powerful, but bound by ethics and consequence.
Secrecy, surveillance, and the psychic body
If thrillers are our modern morality plays about power, The Invisible Eye stages its conflict on a new frontier: where secrecy, surveillance, and the psychic body meet. Catherine’s late father’s research—hinted at through classified trails—echoes Cold War paranoias and anticipates present-tense questions about data, consent, and cognitive autonomy. The suggestion is unsettling: the next contested space may be interior—memory, perception, the subtle ways we read and are read—rather than merely digital.
All of this arrives in familiar cultural weather. The last decade mainstreamed practices once relegated to the occult aisle—tarot, astrology, energy work—even as public trust in institutions thinned. People track sleep and stress with biometric precision, then tell each other to “trust your gut.” Hall’s novel takes that contradiction seriously. It’s not anti-science; it’s anti-reduction. It argues that intuition can be trained and ethically used, and that denying it exacts its own costs—on bodies, relationships, and communities.
A character tuned to the present
Catherine’s world toggles between surfaces and depths. In fashion, the work is to craft the surface and manage the image. Upstate, the past is buried in plain sight: colonial stone over older ground, highways paved over forgotten roads, quiet towns full of unspoken history. The book suggests that truth requires fluency in both registers—the discipline to make meaning in public and the courage to interrogate what the land, and the body, remember.
That dual fluency also maps onto gendered expectations. Female-led thrillers often resolve supernatural tension by translating it into procedural mastery. Hall resists that flattening. Catherine is a modern professional who understands the social and economic costs of being “the psychic one” in rooms that prize metrics. She also understands the psychic costs of refusing what’s innate. Watching her move from mitigation to stewardship mirrors a larger cultural shift as more people build language and community around sensitivities that once lived in private. The book doesn’t romanticize the process. There are consequences to seeing too much, to feeling too much. But it argues, convincingly, that the only way out is through.
The ways we know
Buffalo readers will recognize themselves in the book’s temperament: pragmatic and haunted, skeptical and curious. The city’s experimental art scenes and industrial bones have long taught residents to hold two truths at once. The Invisible Eye reads like an expression of that posture. It doesn’t dismiss the unseen, and it doesn’t deify it. It makes room.
The book is also a time capsule of a particular Buffalo-to-world pipeline. Hall—now living and writing in the Capital Region—channels a UB education that gave permission to take the metaphysical seriously, a mentor’s memoir that grounded sight in family and city, and fieldwork in Lily Dale that modeled communal identity around the taboo. Those threads wrap around a contemporary plot about secrecy, science, and what counts as credible.
As cultural journalism in novel form, The Invisible Eye lands its argument gently but firmly: intuition is not the enemy of reason; it’s a parallel discipline with its own ethics and risks. In an era of contested facts and algorithmic overwhelm, that feels less like escapism and more like civic advice.
Come for the twisty investigation and atmosphere; stay for the more subversive proposition—that the most radical thing a thriller can do right now is dignify the quiet, persistent ways we know. Buffalo, with its psychic lineage and creative contrarianism, turns out to be an ideal place to make that case.
