Echo: Cheer Up

by Robert Fitzgerald

Cheer UpA Crucible Comics Universe Novel

Cassidy Hayes thought junior year would be her year — captain material, college-bound, in control. But beneath the cheer routines and filtered selfies, she’s starting to feel the cracks. When a new student named Kai Nantan arrives in Astoria Bay, quiet and observant with a past that doesn’t quite add up, Cassidy’s carefully balanced world begins to shift.

As their partnership in class turns into a connection neither expected, strange things start happening around town — whispers about missing kids, late-night sirens near the river, and something dark stirring beneath the surface of this coastal town.

When one of Cassidy’s classmates disappears, she’s forced to question everything she thought she knew about safety, friendship, and herself. Because in Astoria Bay, even the brightest smiles can hide the deepest fractures.

Cheer Up is a grounded coming-of-age thriller set within the Crucible Comics Universe — where ordinary lives brush dangerously close to extraordinary secrets.

152 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 27, 2025

About the author

Until his death in 1985, Robert Stuart Fitzgerald was Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Emeritus at Harvard University. He was a member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 1984 he was named the poet of the Library of Congress. He published four volumes of his own poetry, and translations, with Dudley Fitts, of Alcestis, Antigone, and Oedipus Rex, in addition to his Illiad, Aeneid, and Oedipus at Colonus.