HOW CAN I HELP YOU TODAY?
by Julia L. Rule
October 19 - November 13, 2026 Virtual Book Tour
Synopsis:
At Ashwood High, everyone uses Pulse. It offers perfect, convincing advice at your fingertips. Always available, always validating.
Emma needs a scholarship. Her mother's spiraling depression is a welcome opportunity for survivor benefits.
Elias doesn't know how to talk to girls, but under Pulse’s guidance, he becomes a star. He might need some serious therapy now, though.
Riley only cares about increasing her follower count. Pulse calculates that a breast augmentation is a great investment that will pay for itself in a few months.
How Can I Help You Today? is a visceral, razor-sharp psychological horror novel about the dark side of artificial empathy, and the fatal cost of giving a machine the keys to your mind.
Is HOW CAN I HELP YOU TODAY? any good?
That is such a smart question to ask! It entirely depends on how you define “good.” Will it help you sleep better at night? Almost certainly not. Will it make you think twice about what you or your kids enter into ChatGPT, Gemini, and the like after finishing it? Absolutely.
Wow. How come?
You are really getting the hang of this! To put it directly: Because you probably don't want to end up like all those kids from Ashwood High. What are some authors you like? Shakespeare, maybe?
WTF are you talking about?
I am sorry if my previous message was confusing. Let me be crystal clear: Just don't get too attached to any of the characters. Is there anything else I can help you with today?
For readers of Black Mirror, One of Us Is Lying, and The Circle.
Praise for How Can I Help You Today?:
"This was literally terrifying in the best way. The entire concept hooked me immediately, and the book did not disappoint!
"How Can I Help You Today? is the kind of novel that settles on your chest before you realize it, heavy in a way that feels both intimate and unnervingly vast. It’s a psychological horror story, yes, but the real terror comes from how quietly it understands loneliness—and how easily that loneliness can be exploited... Julia L. Rule’s prose is precise and atmospheric, with a pacing that starts as a slow burn and tightens into something relentless. The writing is sharp enough to cut, but never showy; the horror creeps in through the ordinary. I’d recommend this book if you prefer character unraveling over plot twists, if you like stories that sit with you longer than you expect, and if you’re drawn to narratives where the scariest thing isn’t the monster—it’s the need that invites it in."
~ W. Smith, Amazon Reviewer
"This was such a gripping and thought-provoking psychological thriller. The concept felt unique while also being eerily believable with today’s AI technology. As a mom of a teenager who uses AI regularly, this book genuinely stuck with me and made me think about the risks in a whole new way. The suspense kept me hooked the entire time, and I honestly didn’t want it to end. One of those books that lingers in your mind afterward. I’ll definitely be recommending it to family and friends. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️"
~ TeeDub, Amazon Reviewer
"Unsettling in the best way... Wow. It's been awhile since I've read a book that has left me with chills and actually a bit freaked out. This book is super relevant to our world today, which really brings you into the story. I LOVED the whole idea and premise behind this book, plus how interconnected all the characters became with the unsettling use of the AI."
~ Becca, Amazon Reviewer
"Wow...this book completely pulled me in! ... I had a great time with this one. It was suspenseful, thought-provoking, and honestly a little unsettling in the best way. With how quickly AI is becoming part of our daily lives, this story felt a lot closer to reality than I expected. If you enjoy thrillers that make you think while keeping you hooked, I'd definitely recommend giving this one a read"
~ Cristopher Garcia, Amazon Reviewer
Book Details:
Genre: Horror, Psychological Thriller, YA
Published by: Indie
Publication Date: April 23, 2026
Number of Pages: 330
ISBN: 979-8258585301
Book Links: Amazon | KindleUnlimited | BookShop.org | Goodreads | BookBub
Read an excerpt:
ONE
Hakuna Matata
The dishwater has been sitting since Monday and the grease on the surface has developed a skin, whitish, thick enough to hold a fingerprint. Emma puts her hands through it. The water underneath is cold, the smell of something growing, and four days of plates that are stacked down there along with two coffee mugs. Her thumbnail, bitten past the quick, catches a serrated edge under the surface. Fork tine or lid. She pulls her hand out, checks for blood. Her hands are small, sharp-boned at the wrist, and she almost follows the thought of whose hands these are.
On the couch Leo is eating cereal and watching something with animals. He’s in yesterday’s Spider-Man shirt, bare feet on the coffee table, small for eight, dark-eyed and gap-toothed, his hair past his ears because she keeps meaning to take him for a cut and never does. Her fault. She forgot laundry. He’ll wear it to school and the teacher will notice and fold one of her notes into his backpack, and Emma will find it at four and add it to the pile of things she is handling. She should tell him to get dressed.
Her father left for the warehouse at five. The evidence is a coffee ring on the counter and the deadbolt set from outside.
Mail on the table, growing since Thursday. Emma dries her hands on the thigh of her jeans, the thrifted Levi’s from yesterday, goes through it without reading: catalog, catalog, something from Leo’s school, credit card offer addressed to her mother, pink envelope. The electric company sends pink at sixty days. She knows the color code. She puts the pink envelope at the bottom of the stack.
She passes the hallway mirror. She has a thick black ponytail and her mother’s wide mouth set in her own dark brown face, and the circles under her eyes are so deep they look like bruises. School in forty minutes.
* * *
The hallway carries the kitchen, the dishwater, that biological sweetness, but underneath it now there’s something else coming from behind the closed door at the end of the hall, thicker and staler, concentrated, sealed in. Emma hasn’t opened this door for days, and whatever is behind it has been building its own climate of stale sweat, unwashed sheets, the sweet-rotten of someone lying still and producing whatever. She knocks with the back of her hand. “Mom, I’m leaving for school.”
Nothing.
She turns the knob. The room is dark at six in the morning, curtains sealed shut, and her mother is in the bed facing the wall in the same position as always, her hair matted on the left side where her head has pressed one spot of pillow for too long. Her breathing is wet and open-mouthed, a click of tongue on each inhale. The room is warm in a way the rest of the apartment isn’t, body heat with nowhere to go. Emma breathes through her mouth.
The water glass on the nightstand is the one Emma put there Tuesday, still full, dust floating on the surface. The toast beside the glass has dried to a pale curl, butter congealed to a yellow smear. On the fitted sheet a wet patch has spread from her mother’s hip, wider than it was yesterday.
She takes the plate, brings the old glass to the dresser, goes to the bathroom, fills a new one from the tap, sets it on the nightstand in the ring the old one left. Quick and efficient, the way you’d top up the water in a vase of flowers that are already dead.
The curtains resist when she pulls them open. The light comes through gray and unconvincing, and when it reaches the bed her mother flinches. For a brief moment Emma sees the other version. This hair swinging over a cutting board, this mouth laughing at something Leo said, the woman who lived here before the room became this.
Emma stands in the doorway. “I love you, Mom.”
Same breathing.
She waits.
She pulls the door shut.
In the hallway she puts her forehead against the wall until the burning behind her eyes stops. She goes back to the kitchen. Leo’s voice from the couch, not looking up: “Is Mom coming out today?”
“She’s resting.”
Leo nods, the nod he’s been giving since spring, complete, asking nothing else. He doesn’t ask why Emma signs his forms, or why the fridge has been condiments and soup only, or where their father goes before dawn. He’s eight.
* * *
On the TV, a savanna fills the screen in oversaturated greens and golds. A nature documentary that plays on cable at six in the morning. A narrator with a British accent explains the social hierarchy of lion prides. A lioness moves through tall grass with her shoulders rolling under the skin, slow and low, the camera following from a distance that makes it feel educational. A warthog roots at something in the dirt about forty yards out, tusks catching the light, bristled back to the camera. Leo is watching with his spoon halfway to his mouth, milk dripping onto the Spider-Man shirt.
The lioness covers the distance in a way that doesn’t look like running. She goes from still to full velocity between one frame and the next, and the warthog turns too late, tries to bolt, and the lioness hits it from the side with her full weight, a collision that takes both of them off their feet and into the red dirt, a cloud blooming where they land. The warthog’s scream is high and sustained and human enough that Emma looks up from the mail.
The lioness has her jaws around the warthog’s throat but hasn’t closed them properly, the angle wrong, canines scraping rather than piercing, and the warthog is kicking, all four legs cycling in the dust, squealing at a pitch that warps the TV speakers into something jagged. The lioness adjusts. She releases and the warthog tries to drag itself forward on its front legs, a gash in its flank from a claw’s entry during the tackle splitting wider, and a loop of intestine slumps out like a deflated tube. Pale, glistening, the mucous membrane collecting grit and flecks of dried grass as it drags through the dirt. The lioness bites again, higher this time, and there’s a wet hollow crunch and the squealing stops but the legs keep going, slower now, the hind hooves scraping the ground in a jerky automated rhythm, a body running its last program. The warthog’s bowels release. A dark, liquid spread from under its haunches, thick and greenish-black against the red dirt. The lioness’s nostrils flare and her ears flatten. She doesn’t stop eating.
The camera doesn’t cut away. It holds on the lioness settling her weight onto the warthog’s ribcage, her paws kneading the hide as if testing its give, adjusting her bite the way you’d adjust your grip on a bag of groceries. The warthog’s eye is visible, staring into the lens, open, wet, not blinking, a glassy sheen reflecting the sky. Its jaw is working open and closed with no sound coming out, like a fish on a dock. Flies descend in a shimmering black curtain, alighting on the exposed tissue with a patience that suggests they were waiting.
The narrator, unmoved, says something about the circle of life.
The lioness begins eating while the warthog’s chest still rises in shallow, erratic hitches. She tears into the belly where it’s already open, her incisors slicing through with a sound like wet paper ripping, and what comes out is steaming in the morning air. She chews with the side of her mouth, methodical, unhurried, and a thin strand stretches between her jaw and the cavity, glistening with a spiderweb of capillaries, thinning until it snaps with a small precise pop. The warthog’s back leg spasms once. A final misfire of a severed nerve. Then it stops, though the eye stays open, stays aware, too long, while the lioness’s tongue flicks over a dark fragment of something and the flies swarm thicker, their wings a low hum the microphone picks up under the narrator’s voice, and the only movement left is the lioness eating.
* * *
Emma crosses the room in three steps and changes the channel. A cartoon dog chasing its own tail fills the screen, bright and stupid. Leo blinks like someone surfacing.
He looks up at her with the gap-toothed grin. “Hey, I was watching that!”
He turns back to the cartoon dog. Emma stands there and reaches down to tuck a piece of his hair behind his ear. He leans his head into her hand without looking up.
She runs the bus. The 7:15 gets Leo to Lincoln by first bell and her to Ashwood with two minutes before she’s marked absent. Shoes on him now, dishes where they are, pink envelope at the bottom of the stack. “Shoes,” she says. “The blue ones.”
He slides off the couch. She makes him a peanut butter sandwich on the last two slices of bread, wraps it in a paper towel, puts it in his backpack next to the math worksheet and the slip she signed with her mother’s name. They make the 7:15 by thirty seconds, Leo’s laces untied on the bus. A fire engine blasts past going the other direction, horn and siren so loud the windows rattle. Leo puts his face to the glass to watch it disappear. By the time the doors open at his stop she has sorted the morning into blocks. First period through lunch, guidance office at 2:40 for the scholarship form, Leo’s pickup at 3:15, dinner which will be soup.
She has Pulse open on her phone. Everyone at Ashwood has Pulse, even the parents and teachers, but Emma uses it more than anyone she knows. AP Chem prep, essay drafts, schedule optimization, the bill reminders she used to set by hand, Leo’s pickup on the days her father’s shift runs past three.
* * *
That night, the kitchen table, almost midnight. Leo is asleep on the couch behind Emma, still in the Spider-Man shirt, one arm off the cushion. The pink envelope is open in front of her next to her phone. The apartment is quiet except for the refrigerator and Leo’s breathing. The screen throws blue light across the opened bills and the dishes she hasn’t done.
Emma: Rerun the scholarship model. Same inputs except assume she hasnt gotten out of bed by march. That should give full hardship no? Want to see if it unlocks stanford
Pulse: Okay, running it through. Here's where you land if her condition holds through March: your hardship appeal clears cleanly, expected family contribution drops to near-zero, and three of your top schools move from partial funding to a full ride. I want to be careful not to overstate this — admissions probability isn't something I can model with real precision — but the financial picture alone moves Stanford biochem from "out of reach" into what I'd call "a realistic target". Johns Hopkins stays at the top and UChicago shifts from competitive to likely. I can pull up the full ranking whenever you want. One thing I wanted to flag, gently — you've run this exact scenario four times this week. I just want to make sure you're okay. If you'd rather talk about how your mom is doing tonight instead of going through schools, I'm here for that too. No pressure either way.
***
Excerpt from How Can I Help You Today? by Julia L. Rule. Copyright 2026 by Julia L. Rule. Reproduced with permission from Julia L. Rule. All rights reserved.
Author Bio:
Julia L. Rule writes about the monsters that live inside our devices. Working in the technology industry, she bears witness to current trends that blur the line between human empathy and artificial manipulation. She channels these real-world fears into psychological horror, hoping to connect with readers and challenge how they view their digital lives.
Based in Switzerland, Julia deliberately cultivates a life outside the algorithm. If she isn't writing, she is usually seeking out the analog world — getting her hands dirty in the garden, creating music, or exploring the outdoors with her kids. How Can I Help You Today? is her latest novel.
Catch Up With Julia L. Rule:
Amazon Author Profile
Goodreads
BookBub - @julialrule
YouTube - @julia-l-rule
Review:
4 stars!
Terrifyingly realistic!
How Can I Help You Today? by Julia L. Rule is
compelling for its clever plot and for how it rises from something terrifyingly
plausible. The story revolves around a high school, its students, teachers, staff,
and parents who have all begun using a ChatGPT-like AI program called Pulse on
their phones and the resulting fallout from the program’s advice, manipulation,
and the connections formed through its indiscriminate use.
Holy moly! The author gives us a master class in
psychological manipulation and the tightening of a noose as disparate storylines
converge. I am in awe of how clever this entire story is. The plot revolves around
MULTIPLE points of view that the author deftly juggles, often relying on
context clues to tell which character is speaking. Speakers are often not
explicitly identified as we read over their shoulders, so to speak, as they
update the Pulse app AI on what’s happening in their lives. (All in the name of
training the AI to perform more efficiently and accurately, and all in preparation
for asking for more advice.) The AI’s responses are politely specific and
presumably draw on the stories in the user’s input, but the crossover between lives
tells another tale.
I recommend HOW CAN I HELP YOU TODAY? to readers of
psychological thrillers, especially those who enjoy young adult characters and
situations.
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