People have these strange complexes about love. As the city gets colder, what do hearts do? Vagrants Antony and Gerard Shepherd arrive on floor E of the Complexes, an apartment building on an east-coast city. What begins as casual encounters on slow elevators becomes an intricate web of miscommunication and resentment of all kinds. Gerard falls in love with the matriarch of a family falling apart at the seams. Antony befriends a strange security guard, a twelve-year-old with a penchant for words, and a girl whose self-loathing can only be explained by a diagnosis. As the world slowly freezes and cigarettes cease working on trembling anxieties, the troubled inhabitants of floor E must escape or stand together.
About the Author: C.M. Chua, or ChristelleMarie Chua, now eighteen, once hailed from Marikina City in the Philippines. She moved to the United States at age two and promptly devoured the English language. After learning to read at age three, she quickly adopted the arts of reading and writing. Her first short story was, admittedly, a rip off of W.I.T.C.H. by Elizabeth Gnone, but it did get to hang in her second-grade classroom for multiple days. Inspired by television shows, video games, and books, she and her sister, Maria, composed epic stories in the middle of the night. After abandoning writing for multiple years, she finally took up the art again while writing in earnest in sixth grade. From then on, she has written multiple short stories and poems from genres varying from sci-fi to semi-autobiographical. With the help of her teachers, friends, and students at her high school writing workshop, her writing grew and culminated in the form of Complexes. Christelle's goal is to change perspectives with stories that depict true-to-life relationships. She breaches topics like sexuality, mental illness, family, and what it really means to be in love in today's fast-paced, modern society. She also hopes to usher in a new generation of writers - writers whose backgrounds range from the Philippines to South America. Indeed, Christelle considers herself a simple young adult who enjoys changing her hairstyles, punk rock music, and cats. She attends New York University, and plans to increase her connections, list of completed short stories, and list of completed novels.