About The Author
Austin Smith. Writing as Indigo Swann.
Austin Smith doesn’t write the kind of fiction that lets you settle in comfortably. He writes the kind that sits with you afterward, in the quiet, asking questions you didn’t know you had.
He chose the name Indigo Swann deliberately. It carries weight. It signals that what you’re about to read exists at a boundary most fiction doesn’t go near: where horror meets philosophy, where personal experience bleeds into supernatural narrative, where the story stops being just a story and starts being something else entirely.
The Mushroom Farm is his debut novel. It took years. It costs something to write. And it arrived the way things that matter tend to arrive: with a sign that couldn’t be ignored.
In His Own Words
“The day this book was completed, and the ending read aloud, on 11:11:2025, the Aurora Borealis appeared over my house. This was the healing Tone of God I felt after experiencing Samadhi earlier that Summer. From a series of events afterward, it has become apparent that we are the Authors, actors, and directors of our own movies. The Aether interacts with our will as we align that will with the power of belief and pure intention. Focus your will on the higher Aeons. Point the intent of your will towards good and aim your triangles up. The pyramids were 1.1. phi-harmonic reflections of water aimed at harnessing the power of the internal torsion field and the pentangles of the sun.” — Austin Smith
That quote is not a metaphor. It is not a marketing device. It is what actually happened the night this book finished becoming what it was always going to be.
Austin writes from direct experience: of darkness, of transformation, of the moments where the ordinary world shows you its seams. The Mushroom Farm was not constructed on the basis of research or genre convention. It came from somewhere real. The horror in it is real. The philosophical questions underneath the horror are real.
The conviction that consciousness is not passive, that belief shapes reality, that we are each the authors of something larger than we realize, that is the bedrock on which the entire novel is built.
He is not interested in writing safe books.
He is not interested in conclusions that comfort.
He is interested in the truth that exists past the edge of what most fiction is willing to go.
The Mushroom Farm is that place. The first of many to come.
