Duplicity and Duress

It came in a flash but didn't end that way--this was a news story headline during an historic snowstorm hitting Philadelphia in January, 2011. With that storm came a barrage of mysterious events, people, street theatre, harassment, intimidation, and psychological manipulation all which were caught up in a struggle with a benevolent force that whipped the narrator up into a whirlwind of activity, a vortex, she never knew existed. Take a conspiratorial ride along with author Erin Vans in a quest to find out who, what, where, why and how this vortex, this seeming ambush, was pulled off in plain sight here in a city claiming to be known for Brotherly Love.

Her computer came on, by itself, in the middle of the night. There was clanking by the bike stand outside her window and a white van idling in the street. She pulled the curtain aside to get a better look only to realize....she'd been set-up. Duplicity and Duress: Snap Factories in the Making is a fictional account of a horrendous experience one survivor, one targeted individual, endured without ever having knowingly done anything to deserve it. Erin Vans reports on a matrix of highly sophisticated psychological operations unleashed on a lone survivor who races and winds through the streets of Philadelphia in a desperate attempt to find answers. In this reportage-style story, Vans allows the reader to see how easily a networked group of people can surround one vulnerable person to wreak havoc unlike anything we've ever seen before. Is this a modern form of localized warfare--networks of people creating a snapper by taunting a select individual with the potential to freak out. There is an implication that the big, bad media machine is salivating at the bit for the next bloodshed disaster. It leaves readers wondering, what is orchestrated, and what is not...and how much do people get paid to fester it all?

Erin Vans (pseudonym) is a freelance writer and dog walker who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She's written on everything from the logo on your pen to domestic violence, and she's covered a few movers and shakers in Washington, DC who hailed from University of Florida. She earned an MFA from The New School in NYC and is in hot pursuit of answers surrounding the mysterious and nefarious events prompting her to write this book.