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Alutophobia: Cleanliness Is Not Innocent, Some Things Should Never be Washed Away
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jan 15 2026
Pages: 158
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.34 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Lev Kovač has built his life on control. As a quality assurance specialist in the pharmaceutical industry, he measures purity, eliminates contamination, and ensures that nothing unwanted remains. Every morning begins the same way-with a perfectly calibrated shower, a ritual of precision and order.
Then his grandmother dies.
What she leaves behind is not just a house, but a refusal. For seventy years, she never washed. Inside her home, dust is not neglect but pattern. Coffee stains form messages. Soap-hundreds of bars of it-has been collected, cataloged, and never used.
At first, Lev believes it's madness. A relic of trauma, something to be cleaned, corrected, erased.
But as he reads her journals, a different truth begins to emerge-one buried beneath decades of silence, hidden in the language of industry, efficiency, and things no one was meant to question. The more he learns, the harder it becomes to return to his routines. The act of washing begins to feel... wrong.
Because some things are not meant to be removed.
As Lev's body begins to change and his world closes in-neighbors complaining, authorities intervening, institutions stepping in to help-he is forced to confront a terrifying possibility:
What if cleanliness isn't restoration...
but erasure?
And what if the only way to remember
is to refuse to be made clean?
ABLUTOPHOBIA is a literary psychological horror novel about memory, contamination, and the cost of being made clean in a world that survives by forgetting.
For readers of Annihilation, The Employees, and Mexican Gothic.
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