Shawn Boley is a Washington-based author and Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker with experience supporting neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ people and providing gender-affirming care. He holds a Master of Social Work from the University of Washington and is a member of the LGBTQ+ community.
His clinical background, experience working with autistic youth, and relationships with neurodivergent and LGBTQ+ people helped shape his first novel, The Neuroverse. His fiction blends literary speculative horror, political satire, psychological dread, and mythic structure. Through interwoven characters and timelines, he examines how institutions turn ideas about normality into mechanisms of control.
As a gay man and therapist, Shawn has long been interested in the pressure people face to become legible, predictable, and easy to categorize. He wrote The Neuroverse to explore what happens when society’s promise of comfort becomes a demand for sameness. Speculative horror gave him a way to make that pressure literal—and to imagine resistance rooted not in becoming less different, but in refusing to disappear.