Jayman Cross's latest work of adult fiction, MOM TRIED, takes readers into a rural farmhouse where a mother and her eighteen-year-old son are left to manage both the farm and their lives after the husband and father walks away. The novel is intended for readers aged 18 and older and is available now through Amazon KDP.
The story is set in a small farmhouse far outside a quiet country town, a place where every hallway seems to echo a little louder once the people who used to fill it are gone. This setting is not merely a backdrop; it functions as a pressure chamber. With no steady stream of neighbors, no built-in reason to leave for the day, and no easy distance between family members, the isolation becomes the ordinary, grinding kind—the isolation of daily chores, of a farm that doesn't run itself, of a town too far away to visit casually. Over time, this isolation quietly shapes how the mother and son relate to each other, making the book a natural fit within rural psychological fiction and dark farmhouse fiction genres.
At the heart of MOM TRIED is the question of what happens when loneliness becomes the only constant in someone's life. Most people spread their emotional needs across a handful of relationships—a friend, a coworker, a parent, a partner. When one piece disappears, the others usually absorb some of the slack. But in this story, after the father leaves, the mother and son are short almost every other connection that would normally help carry the emotional weight of daily life. What's left is each other. The son, only recently an adult, becomes someone his mother increasingly leans on for farm work, company, reassurance, and the simple experience of not being alone. The mother, in turn, becomes the one steady presence in her son's world at an age when most young people are just beginning to build a life outside their family.
Cross's exploration of emotional dependency is quietly devastating because it doesn't require a villain or a single bad decision. It only requires circumstances that leave two people with nowhere else to put their needs. As the story develops, the shift from 'mother and son managing a hard situation together' to something far more complicated happens through accumulation—through the son becoming more of a partner in decision-making than a child following instructions, through the mother beginning to rely on her son the way she might once have relied on her husband, and through both of them slowly losing the outside perspective that would normally remind them where the boundaries are supposed to sit. Without anyone else around to notice or gently correct course, the roles that once felt fixed start to feel more like suggestions.
MOM TRIED moves into genuinely difficult territory as a forbidden attraction grows between two adults who share a family bond neither of them chose to complicate. Cross does not present this development as uncomplicated or easy for his characters. Both the mother and the son experience real internal conflict—a tangle of guilt, shame, secrecy, and confusion that runs through the second half of the story. Neither character is written as simply 'giving in' to desire without cost. The narrative consistently makes clear how much distress this situation causes both of them. The book does not present this relationship as healthy, safe, or something to be admired. It is written as a dark and difficult consequence of extreme isolation and emotional need, a portrait of how far two people can drift from the boundaries they once respected when nothing is left to hold them back.
This is why MOM TRIED matters: it asks readers to sit with the discomfort of watching two people lose their footing, one small moment at a time, and to think honestly about how much of what happened came from circumstance rather than choice. It is a story that treats its characters' choices as genuinely costly and morally fraught, and it does not offer a tidy resolution. Instead, it invites readers to consider how quickly the roles we take for granted can bend under enough loneliness, and how much guilt and secrecy can grow in the space that's left behind.
MOM TRIED is written specifically for adults aged eighteen and older who are drawn to fiction that doesn't look away from difficult subjects. Readers who enjoy dark adult fiction, psychological fiction for adults, morally complex adult fiction, forbidden relationship novels, and complex family relationship novels will likely recognize the shape of this story quickly. It is not a book for readers looking for something light, comfortable, or easily resolved. It is for readers who want fiction that explores uncomfortable subjects honestly, without pretending those subjects are simple.
